【AI前沿】Palantir Held Another ‘Hack Week.’ This Time, the Focus Was ICE

Makena KellyPoliticsMay 21, 2026 1:44 PMPalantir Held Another ‘Hack Week.’ This Time, the Focus Was ICEThe hackathon, held to build user-auditing tools for Palantir customers, comes as the company struggles to address employee concerns over its relationship with ICE.Photograph: VINCENT FEURAY/Getty ImagesCommentLoaderSave StorySave this storyCommentLoaderSave StorySave this storyPalantir hosted ahack week this spring to try to turninternal consternationover the company’s work with theDepartment of Homeland Security(DHS) and Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) into clearer oversight tools for products used in the Trump administration’s immigration crackdown, according to material reviewed by WIRED.The new tools provide organizations, including DHS and ICE, more information on how their workers use Palantir software. Organizations can set up alerts for “concerning behavior,” like exfiltrating datasets, and search the session logs of individual users. They also allow organizations to see which users have viewed specific sets of information.Palantir declined to comment.Palantir regularlyholds hack weeks, challenging engineers from across the company to experiment with and solve problems in its products. This hack week focused on Palantir’s work with DHS and ICE, which has come under fire from both external critics and workerswho fear the company’s toolsare empowering the Trump administration’s immigration crackdown.“This effort embodies the culture of the Palantir that I choose to work at,” Ted Mabrey, head of Palantir’s commercial business, wrote in an email to staff in early May. “You have the option to slam cynical emojis in slack channels, distrust your colleagues, and choose to think that narrative-motivated outsiders lying about Palantir’s work are more honest than the people showing up to do that work every day. Or you can have the courage to engage and innovate.”Bringing together employees from across Palantir, this year’s hack week focused on building new tools to provide additional oversight over user behavior on platforms like Foundry, the company’sdata integration and analysis tool.Palantir’s work with ICE has grown enormously over the last year. Last year, WIRED reported that ICE paid the company $30 million to build a productcalled “ImmigrationOS”that would provide “near real-time visibility” on self-deportations out of the US. It’s alsobeen reportedthat the company built a separate tool called Enhanced Leads Identification & Targeting for Enforcement (ELITE) that creates maps of individuals who have beentargeted for deportation.Some of the new tools created during hack week have already been deployed, with others set to roll out later this year, according to an email reviewed by WIRED. (“These tools materially expand the usability of Audit logs and checkpoints,” wrote one team lead, “not just on [Palantir’s DHS contract], but anywhere Foundry operates in high-sensitivity environments.”)Got a Tip?Are you a current or former Palantir worker who wants to talk about what’s happening? We’d like to hear from you. Using a nonwork phone or computer, contact the reporter securely on Signal at makenakelly.32.“This hack week demonstrated that Palantir can convert internal attention around work [on the DHS contract] into additional platform-level safeguards,” the team lead wrote in the May email. “Rather than turning away from challenging work, commercial FDEs [forward deployed engineers] across the company wanted to jump into the breach.”Palantir’s involvement with ICE faced harsh internal backlash earlier this year after Minneapolis nurse Alex Pretti was shot and killed by federal agents. Internal Slack chatsreviewed by WIREDshowed employees questioning the ethics behind the work and demanding more transparency into it.“Can Palantir put any pressure on ICE at all?” one worker wrote at the time. “I’ve read stories of folks rounded up who were seeking asylum with no order to leave the country, no criminal record, and consistently check in with authorities. Literally no reason to be rounded up. Surely we aren’t helping do that?”Still, Palantir has continued working with ICE. In February, DHS reached a $1 billionpurchasing agreementwith Palantir, making it easier to secure the company’s products across all branches of the agency, including ICE. The agreement reinforced Palantir’s foothold at DHS and established a pathway for subagencies, like the US Secret Service, to work with the company.On May 6, the company updated an internal wiki on its ICE contracts and announced that it had received its first full task order under that purchasing agreement, extending its ImmigrationOS pilot program into an official product through the spring of 2027. According to public contracting records, DHS paid Palantir $86 million for this extension, which also covers the “modernization and operational capability” of ICE’s case management software.