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Peter Thiel Part 4: ImmigrationOS - Palantir’s $60 Million ICE Deal Built a Targeting App for Mass Deportation.Internal Palantir documents, court testimony, and Securities and Exchange Commission filings describe a system that pulls in 80 million Medicaid records and presents ICE officers with a deportation-target dashboard “kind of like Google Maps.” PREVIOUSLY RELEASED This is part four of an eleven-part series on Peter Theil.The introduction to the series is below: - Peter Thiel Part 1: The President Bought Palantir Stock, Then Publicly Endorsed the Company - Peter Thiel Part 2: From Apartheid Namibia to Foster City: The Formative Years - Peter Thiel Part 3: Federal AI Policy Drafted by Peter Thiel’s Former Chief of Staff In July 2025, U.S.Immigration and Customs Enforcement awarded Palantir Technologies a no-bid $30 million contract to build a prototype surveillance platform that the agency calls “ImmigrationOS” (USA Today / AOL; Business Insider / Yahoo; Immigration Policy Tracking Project).Two months later, in September 2025, Palantir began work under a separate $29.9 million contract to develop and maintain a tool called Enhanced Leads Identification & Targeting for Enforcement, or ELITE (404 Media; MSN).Together with smaller awards, the company received more than $60 million from ICE in a single year for these projects.According to a Palantir Form PX14A6G filing with the Securities and Exchange Commission, the company has signed more than $81 million in technology contracts with ICE since January 2025.The ImmigrationOS prototype contract carries Federal Contract ID 70CTD022FR0000170 and runs through September 2027.ICE has not publicly released its user guide for either system.404 Media obtained an internal copy and reported on it in January 2026, subsequently publishing a reconstruction of the guide itself.What ELITE Does The internal user guide describes ELITE as “a targeting tool designed to improve capabilities for identifying and prioritizing high-value targets through advanced analytics.” 404 Media’s reporting, which has not been disputed by Palantir or ICE, characterized the interface as operating “kind of like Google Maps.” When an ICE officer opens the app, the system presents a map.The map displays the density of people whom the system identifies as having what it calls an “immigration nexus” across a given geographic area.When an officer selects an individual, ELITE produces a dossier including: - A photograph - The person’s Alien Registration Number - Date of birth - Last known address - An “Address Confidence Score” between 0 and 100, indicating how reliable the system believes the address information to be The user guide, a retyped version of which 404 Media published, also indicates that during “special operations” targeting “groups of pre-defined aliens,” normal safeguards in ELITE may need to be turned off.Joseph Cox of 404 Media, discussing his reporting on PBS’s Amanpour & Company, described ELITE as a tool that allows ICE officers to draw shapes on the map to select ‘target-rich areas’ for raids.The Medicaid Pipeline ELITE’s data inputs include records from the Department of Health and Human Services.According to USA Today and AP News, a 2025 data-sharing agreement between ICE and the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services granted ICE access to the personal records of approximately 80 million Medicaid patients — individuals enrolled in a public health program with no expectation that their address information would be used for immigration enforcement.In a January 15, 2026 analysis, the Electronic Frontier Foundation — which says it had earlier asked a federal judge to block the use of Medicaid data for immigration enforcement — warned that ICE is using a Palantir tool that draws on Medicaid and other government data to locate people for arrest, consolidating government data into a single AI-driven interface.Separately, in litigation brought by a coalition of states, a preliminary injunction in August 2025 temporarily blocked the CMS–ICE data sharing in the 20 plaintiff states, though a December 2025 ruling allowed some basic Medicaid data to be shared while the case proceeds.Palantir has pushed back on the EFF report, calling it misleading and disputing the suggestion that ICE has unfettered access to HHS records through its software.What is established is that the CMS–ICE data-sharing agreement exists, that it potentially covers tens of millions of Medicaid enrollees, and that 404 Media’s reporting describes ELITE drawing on HHS-sourced data.Oregon Court Testimony In Oregon court proceedings in late 2025 and early 2026, ICE officers confirmed under oath that ELITE was used to identify arrest targets during Oregon raids driven by daily arrest quotas.The testimony was given in the case M-J-M-A v.Wamsley, et al.in the U.S.District Court for the District of Oregon on December 2, 2025, and is referenced in an April 2026 oversight letter sent by Representative Goldman and colleagues to DHS leadership.The testimony is the first publicly documented confirmation that ELITE has been used not as a research tool but as an operational targeting system to select specific people for arrest.The combination of an operational targeting tool, a Medicaid-data input, and daily arrest quotas is the structure that civil-liberties organizations across the political spectrum have warned about for years.In May 2025, thirteen former Palantir employees signed a public letter, shared with NPR, condemning the ICE contracts.They wrote: “Big Tech, including Palantir, is increasingly complicit, normalizing authoritarianism under the guise of a ‘revolution’ led by oligarchs.We must resist this trend.” Palantir has pushed back on characterizations of its role.In a blog post responding to New York Times reporting, the company said it operates as “a data processor” — that its software is used by customers to manage their own data — and has elsewhere maintained that its government work complies with U.S.The Pension Funds and Members of Congress Push Back In February 2026, members of the New Jersey congressional delegation and the New Jersey State Investment Council — as trustees for state pension funds that are significant Palantir shareholders — formally raised concerns about the company’s ICE contracts.In April 2026, Representative Dan Goldman and colleagues sent an oversight letter to DHS and ICE leadership citing the 404 Media reporting and the Oregon court testimony, requesting documentation of Palantir’s role in the immigration enforcement apparatus.These congressional and institutional-investor actions are notable because they originate from established government and pension-system actors rather than from advocacy groups alone.The Founder Peter Thiel co-founded Palantir in 2003.Its first major outside investor was In-Q-Tel, the venture capital arm of the U.S.Central Intelligence Agency (CIA).Thiel remains the company’s chairman and is, by any measure, one of its principal beneficiaries.Palantir’s share price rose more than 90 percent in the months following the November 2024 election, and the company’s federal contract obligations roughly doubled between fiscal years 2024 and 2025.Thiel is also the principal financial backer of Vice President J.D.Vance’s political rise.The ICE contracts at the center of this article were awarded by an administration of which Vance is the second-ranking official, and during the period in which his political patron’s company has won billions of dollars in new federal awards.Outstanding Questions The following questions are not answered by the public record: - How was the decision made to award the $30 million ImmigrationOS contract without competitive bidding?Federal procurement regulations generally require justification for sole-source awards; the publicly released justification cites Executive Orders 14159 and 13773 but does not document why competing vendors could not have met the same requirements.- What error rate does ELITE produce when it identifies a target?Independe