ICE’s own documents describe the mechanism without drama. In a 2019 work statement, the agency said Investigative Case Management was the toolset used by Homeland Security Investigations agents to develop and document criminal investigations. ICE said the system used Palantir’s Gotham product configured for HSI’s operational needs. Its functions included creating investigative cases, maintaining subject records for people, vehicles, businesses, and other things, linking those subjects to reports and cases, creating lookout records shared with Customs and Border Protection, conducting research through internal and external systems, and generating operational reports.¹
This is not a passive filing cabinet. It turns scattered records into institutional motion.
A person becomes a subject record. A subject record becomes linked to other records. A link becomes a report. A report becomes a workflow. By the time an officer acts, the action may still be human, but the path toward action has already been narrowed and lit.
That is why Palantir’s manifesto mattered.
In April, the company posted a 22-point summary of The Technological Republic, the book by Karp and Nicholas Zamiska. It argued that Silicon Valley owes a moral debt to the nation, that technical elites should build national power, that artificial intelligence weapons will be built, that national service should be considered, and that the West has grown too weak in its language of pluralism and restraint. One line from the post was especially blunt: “Free email is not enough.”² TechCrunch and Business Insider both reported on the manifesto’s harder claims, including its support for considering a return to conscription.³ ⁴
A manifesto from a literary journal enters the public argument as opinion. A manifesto from a company embedded in government operations enters as something else: a statement from inside the machinery.
ImmigrationOS gives the argument its current domestic face. In 2025, ICE awarded Palantir roughly $30 million to build or expand a platform tied to targeting and enforcement prioritization, self-deportation tracking, and immigration lifecycle management. Wired reported that ICE expected near-real-time visibility into self-deportation and visa overstays, with a prototype due in 2025 and contract work extending into 2027.⁵ ⁶
That phrase, “near-real-time visibility,” sounds sterile. For the person in the waiting room, it may become a date he cannot miss, a form he cannot decipher quickly enough, or a file that seems to know him better than he knows the file.
Inside Palantir, the tension has not been invisible. After federal agents killed Minneapolis nurse Alex Pretti, Wired reported that employees pressed leadership about the company’s work with ICE. According to that reporting, Palantir described support for enforcement prioritization and targeting, self-deportation tracking, and immigration lifecycle logistics. When an employee asked whether ICE could build workflows outside the narrow scope of a contract, including by pulling from outside data sources, a Palantir executive answered: “Yes, we do not take the position of policing the use of our platform for every workflow.”⁷
That may be a legally ordinary answer. It is also the democratic problem in miniature. Once the operating layer is installed, the issue is no longer only what the vendor intended. It is what the institution can do faster than oversight can follow.
The military side is larger and less visible. In July 2025, the Army announced a Palantir enterprise