Last week, the U.S. Department of Homeland Security (DHS) finalized a $1 billion purchasing agreement with data and software firm Palantir, further solidifying the private company’s long-growing role within the federal agency that oversees all U.S. immigration enforcement operations.

Per contracting documents published publicly last week, the blanket purchase agreement (BPA) that DHS awarded to Palantir is intended to supply commercial software licenses, ongoing maintenance, and on-the-ground implementation services for use across all DHS departments. The agreement streamlines DHS’ procurement process for Palantir’s tools, allowing DHS sub-agencies including Customs and Border Protection (CBP) and Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) to skip the standard competitive bidding process for new purchases of Palantir products and services, for orders totaling up to $1 billion.

Palantir did not immediately respond to requests for comment on the new deal.

The $1 billion agreement was first announced internally to Palantir staff this past Friday, and it comes as the company works to manage rising internal tension among employees over its ongoing work with DHS and ICE. As WIRED reported last week, after Minneapolis nurse Alex Pretti was fatally shot in January, Palantir staffers flooded internal company Slack channels demanding transparency around how the technology they build powers U.S. immigration enforcement. In the wake of that outcry, the company updated its internal wiki to share a small number of previously unreported details about its ICE contracts, and CEO Alex Karp recorded an internal video for employees to attempt to justify the company’s immigration work. During a nearly hour-long conversation with Courtney Bowman, Palantir’s global director of privacy and civil liberties engineering, Karp did not address direct questions about how the company’s technology enables ICE operations. Instead, he told employees they could access more detailed information only if they signed non-disclosure agreements.

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Akash Jain, Palantir’s chief technology officer and president of Palantir U.S. Government Partners — the division that manages the company’s work with federal agencies — openly acknowledged internal and external concerns in his email announcing the new DHS agreement. “I recognize that this comes at a time of increased concern, both externally and internally, around our existing work with ICE,” Jain wrote. “While we don’t normally send out updates on new contract vehicles, in this moment it felt especially important to provide context to help inform your understanding of what this means—and what it doesn’t. There will be opportunities we run toward, and others we decline—that discipline is part of what has earned us DHS’s trust.”

In his Friday internal email, Jain noted that the five-year agreement could allow Palantir to expand its footprint across DHS beyond immigration enforcement, into other major agencies including the U.S. Secret Service (USSS), Federal Emergency Management Administration (FEMA), Transportation Security Administration (TSA), and the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA).

Jain also argued that Palantir’s software actually strengthens protections for U.S. citizens. “These protections help enable accountability through strict controls and auditing capabilities, and support adherence to constitutional protections, especially the Fourth Amendment,” Jain wrote. Palantir’s critics have long pushed back against this framing, arguing that the company’s tools build a massive, unregulated surveillance dragnet that ultimately erodes core civil liberties.

Over the past year, Palantir’s work with ICE has grown dramatically. Last April, WIRED reported that ICE paid Palantir $30 million to build “ImmigrationOS,” a platform that would provide “near real-time visibility” into immigrants completing self-deportation from the U.S. Since that report, it has also been revealed that Palantir developed another tool called Enhanced Leads Identification & Targeting for Enforcement (ELITE), which generates mapped profiles of potential deportation targets by pulling aggregated data from both DHS and the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services (HHS).

To close his Friday email to staff, Jain invited employees curious about the new DHS agreement to work on the contract themselves. “As Palantirians, the best way to understand the work is to engage on the work directly. If you are interested in helping shape and deliver the next chapter of Palantir’s work across DHS, please reach out,” Jain wrote. Palantir internally refers to its employees as “hobbits,” the fictional creatures from The Lord of the Rings, and Jain leaned into this internal branding in his closing line: “There will be a massive need for committed hobbits to turn this momentum into mission outcomes.”