ICE to pay LexisNexis millions to feed deportation data into Palantir system

Full text

Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) plans to pay LexisNexis millions more dollars for continued access to data it can feed into a Palantir platform, according to newly published procurement records. The data is to help, among other sections, ICE’s Enforcement and Removal Operations (ERO), the part of ICE focused on deportation.

The documents provide some more insight into the sort of information ICE intends to use Palantir to process. In January, 404 Media revealed the existence of ELITE, a system Palantir made for ICE that helps the agency find which neighborhoods to target by bringing together data from private suppliers and government agencies.

The news comes as ICE arrested more than 51,000 people in July, many of those at airports .

💡

Do you work at LexisNexis, Palantir, or ICE? I would love to hear from you. Using a non-work device, you can message me securely on Signal at joseph.404 or send me an email at joseph@404media.co.

The data is to support “all aspects of ICE screening and vetting, lead development, and criminal analysis activities,” one of the documents says . That also includes identifying what ICE perceives as fraud “before crime and fraud can materialize and detecting and reporting elements of crimes involving the exploitation or attempts to exploit the immigration and customs laws of the United States.” ICE anticipates paying LexisNexis $6.7 million, according to the records.

LexisNexis has long provided data to ICE across multiple administrations . In this new procurement record, ICE is looking to continue access to “to LexID and Accurint Virtual Crime Center,” according to a listing posted along with the document. LexID and Accurint are LexisNexis tools that take a wealth of data — “over 82 billion public and proprietary records from more than 10,000 sources” according to the company’s website — and link them together to help law enforcement locate people.

A screenshot of the document. The document suggests ICE wants to pair these capabilities and data with Palantir systems, too. One part reads, “The government's requirement is that the database must be able to application programming interface (API) with ICE applications, such as but not limited to, Palantir platform, PenLink, and ICE Data Analytics.” PenLink is another company ICE contracts with which 404 Media previously reported on. It sells social media monitoring tools and one called Webloc for tracking the location of mobile phones in entire neighborhoods.

Palantir has become a key provider of the technical infrastructure for the Trump administration’s mass deportation mission. 404 Media previously reported that the Palantir-made ELITE, or Enhanced Leads Identification & Targeting for Enforcement, populates a map interface with potential deportation targets, and provides ICE officials with a “confidence score” on the person’s current address. Sources for that tool include the Department of Health and Human Services.

It is not clear if ICE intends to ingest LexisNexis’ data into ELITE specifically or some other Palantir platform.

The document also lists several requirements around AI. They include “an artificial intelligence (AI) driven identification system” that can use data to “infer the identity of the end user,” and a facial recognition system that can leverage “large-scale image databases to perform high accuracy facial matching across diverse sources, including open-source media.” It must be able to do this in bulk, the document says.

LexisNexis, Palantir, and ICE did not immediately respond to requests for comment.