Following the fatal shooting of Minneapolis nurse Alex Pretti by federal agents on Saturday, employees at data firm Palantir pushed company leadership for answers about the firm’s ongoing work with U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE)—with dozens of staff openly questioning whether Palantir should partner with the agency at all. In response, top leadership defended the collaboration, noting that part of Palantir’s work is designed to improve “ICE’s operational effectiveness.”

Internal Slack messages reviewed by WIRED lay bare mounting frustration among Palantir staff over the company’s ties to the U.S. Department of Homeland Security (DHS), and specifically its work with ICE’s enforcement and investigations divisions. To address employee concerns, Palantir’s privacy and civil liberties team published an updated entry on the company’s internal wiki detailing its work supporting federal immigration enforcement, arguing that the “technology is making a difference in mitigating risks while enabling targeted outcomes.”

In a Saturday Slack thread discussing Pretti’s killing, Palantir workers questioned both the ethical standing and business logic of continuing the company’s partnership with ICE.

“Our involvement with ICE has been swept under the rug internally far too much during the second Trump administration. We need a full understanding of what our work actually entails here,” one employee wrote.

“Can Palantir put any pressure on ICE at all?” another asked. “I’ve read stories of people seeking asylum who get rounded up even though they have no deportation order, no criminal record, and consistently check in with authorities. Literally no reason to be detained. Surely we aren’t helping do that?”

The discussion unfolded in a company-wide Slack channel dedicated to coverage of general global news. The messages viewed by WIRED received dozens of “+1” emoji reactions from other employees, signaling broad support for demands for more transparency around Palantir’s relationship with ICE. Palantir did not respond to WIRED’s requests for comment for this story.

On Sunday, Courtney Bowman, Palantir’s global director of privacy and civil liberties engineering, addressed the flood of employee questions by linking to the company’s internal wiki entry describing its DHS and immigration enforcement contracts. At the time WIRED reviewed the post, it had most recently been updated on January 24 by Akash Jain, who per his LinkedIn profile serves as chief technology officer and president of Palantir USG, the company’s division that works with U.S. government agencies. The entry states that in April 2025, Palantir launched a six-month pilot supporting ICE across three core focus areas: “Enforcement Operations Prioritization and Targeting,” “Self-Deportation Tracking,” and “Immigration Lifecycle Operations focused on logistics planning and execution.”

These work streams align with a $30 million contract ICE awarded Palantir that same April for a new platform called ImmigrationOS. According to contracting information released by DHS at the time, the system gives ICE “near real-time visibility” into people completing self-deportation and helps the agency identify and prioritize individuals for deportation. Per Palantir’s internal wiki, the pilot for these services was renewed in September for an additional six months, and the self-deportation tracking work “is being folded into the work on Enforcement Operations Prioritization and Targeting.”

Palantir has also launched a new pilot with U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services (USCIS) to assist officials “in identifying fraudulent benefit submissions,” the wiki notes. The Trump administration has used allegations of widespread immigration fraud to justify expanded ICE deployments in cities including Minneapolis.

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“There have been increasing, and increasingly visible, field operations focused on interior immigration enforcement that continue to attract attention to Palantir’s involvement with ICE,” the wiki reads. “We believe that our work could have a real and positive impact on ICE enforcement operations by providing officers and agents with the data to make more precise, informed decisions. We are committed to giving our partners the best software for the job, while acknowledging the reputational risk we face when supporting immigration enforcement operations.”

The wiki acknowledges “increasing reporting around U.S. Citizens being swept up in enforcement action and held, as well as reports of racial profiling allegedly applied as pretense for the detention of some U.S. Citizens,” but argues that Palantir’s customers at ICE “remain committed to avoiding the unlawful/unnecessary targeting, apprehension, and detention of U.S. Citizens wherever and however possible.”

After Bowman shared the updated wiki entry on Slack Sunday, some employees asked follow-up questions about the capabilities of Palantir’s products and whether ICE could use the platform for purposes outside the scope of the company’s contracts. When one worker asked whether ICE could build its own independent workflows outside the terms of the agreement, such as pulling data from external sources, Jain’s response was blunt. “Yes, we do not take the position of policing the use of our platform for every workflow,” Jain said. He acknowledged that Palantir builds in “strong controls,” but added that “that doesn’t mean there won’t be bad apples, mistakes or other issues that lead to adverse outcomes. Those have to be governed by the law and oversight mechanisms within the system—just like a commercial customer.”

The ability to pull data from outside sources—whether from other government agencies or commercially available third-party data providers—expands DHS’s surveillance capacity to target both migrants and U.S. citizens alike.

Palantir has remained largely tight-lipped about the details of its ICE work over the last year, leaving employees to rely on external news reports to learn what services the company actually provides the agency. That long-simmering tension boiled over over the weekend following Pretti’s killing, with at least a dozen employees demanding greater clarification from leadership.

On Friday, independent journalist Ken Klippenstein shared a video appearing to show an ICE agent scanning a legal observer’s car. When the observer asked why the agent was documenting their vehicle, the agent replied, “We have a nice little database, and now you’re considered a domestic terrorist. So have fun with that.” This does not appear to be an isolated incident: according to a declaration filed last week in support of Minnesota’s lawsuit against Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem, an ICE agent shattered a car window before detaining two people inside, telling them their actions—honking the car horn to alert nearby bystanders to ICE’s presence—amounted to “domestic terrorism.”

One Palantir employee shared the video to the company’s Slack workspace on Sunday, asking leadership whether Palantir supplies ICE with the database referenced in the clip. “Ack, I’m not tracking any database like this that we’re involved with/exists,” Jain replied.

“Palantir does not in any way enable ICE personnel to have direct or unfettered access to third-agency databases or datasets outside of those shared for specific operational purposes within the bounds of established data sharing agreements,” the wiki states. Over the last year, ICE has expanded its data-sharing agreements with outside agencies, including the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS). Last April, WIRED reported that Elon Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency was building a centralized master database at DHS to track and surveil migrants, integrating data from agencies including the Social Security Administration and IRS.

Palantir did not respond to a request for comment on whether its software powers the database referenced in the viral video.

Palantir’s work with the federal government has grown dramatically throughout the first year of Donald Trump’s second presidential term, with the firm securing more than $900 million in federal contracts over that period, according to The Hill. Beyond its work in immigration enforcement and with the U.S. military, Palantir has also partnered with the Internal Revenue Service to build a “mega API” for accessing the agency’s internal records. Even with the company’s growing federal footprint, many employees remain critical of its ICE work.

“In my opinion ICE are the bad guys. I am not proud that the company I enjoy so much working for is part of this,” one employee said in the thread discussing Pretti’s killing. “Thinking pragmatically: is the reputational damage we’re taking for being associated with them worth it? What if the next administration is Democratic and they cut all the contracts with us?”