During the height of President Donald Trump’s winter immigration enforcement surge in Minneapolis, a new AI-driven “alien” targeting app appeared on the phones of U.S. Immigrations and Customs Enforcement deportation officers.
Created by tech giant Palantir, a CIA-backed firm known for data mining and using artificial intelligence for everything from warfighting to “predictive policing,” the ELITE app helps ICE target immigrants and issues a “confidence score” for how accurate the information on a target is. The app analyzes data from government agencies and other sources, producing dossiers on targets, compiling them into lists, and mapping their locations.
The debut of ELITE — Enhanced Lead Identification and Targeting — came just as ICE added over 12,000 employees through an expedited hiring surge, placing a badge and a gun in the hands of new recruits in record time, thanks to cuts to ICE’s training curriculum.
Thousands of the new ICE hires, then, were able to hit the streets without cleared background checks, according to reporting by Reuters in early 2026.
“Some of these guys should’ve never been hired, let alone have access to the information on ELITE.”
