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Article: All the Ways Big Tech Fuels ICE and CBP

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6 / 10

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The U.S. federal immigration enforcement agencies, ICE and CBP, rely heavily on technology and infrastructure supplied by major tech companies. These agencies have spent hundreds of millions of dollars since 2023 on products and services from Palantir, Microsoft, Amazon, and Google, with payments often facilitated through third-party contractors.

A significant portion of these contracts is for cloud storage and data management, powering operations across agencies. Palantir, in particular, provides critical data analysis tools to ICE, such as the Investigative Case Management system, which consolidates information from various federal databases for law enforcement use.

The main topics covered are the financial scale of tech contracts between immigration agencies and major companies, the specific roles of cloud infrastructure and data analysis platforms, and the operational reliance of ICE and CBP on these commercial technologies.

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https://www.wired.com/story/how-big-tech-is-powering-trumps-immigration-crackdown/

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Business Latest

Published Date

2026-03-03 11:30

Fetched Date

2026-03-04 14:33

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2026-03-04 15:02

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Present

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Raw Extracted Content

As the federal immigration crackdown has expanded across the United States, the government’s activities have relied on infrastructure from several key tech companies.
The defense tech and IT infrastructure giant Palantir has received particular attention for its work with Immigration and Customs Enforcement. However, when it comes to selling tech to federal immigration authorities, Palantir is far from alone: ICE and Customs and Border Protection are paying hundreds of millions of dollars for products and services from companies like Microsoft, Amazon, and Google.
WIRED examined data and records dated from January 1, 2023, to the present that were posted in the two federal contracting databases—the System for Award Management (SAM) and the Federal Procurement Data System (FPDS)—focusing on contracts with the companies or contract descriptions that explicitly name the companies or use relevant shorthand. WIRED also reviewed public documents from ICE and the Department of Homeland Security pertaining to the technology at ICE and CBP’s disposal. Collectively, they reveal that the agencies are willing to spend significant sums of money to ensure that the companies continue to power their operations.
In total, Palantir has earned about $121.9 million in payments and obligations from ICE since 2023. In that same time frame, ICE has paid for products worth at least $94 million from Microsoft, at least $51 million from Amazon, and at least $921,000 from Google. CBP, meanwhile, has paid for products worth at least $81 million from Microsoft, at least $158 million from Amazon, and at least $7 million from Google. These are minimum estimates that exclude payments that do not directly mention these companies or their core offerings in publicly available documents.
Many of the payments are for cloud storage powering operations across the agencies. Some payment descriptions mention particular offices—like ICE’s Enforcement and Removal Operations, which carries out arrests and deportations—or highly specific databases that store information about everything from students to ongoing criminal cases. Usually, ICE and CBP purchase offerings from these companies through third-parties—in Microsoft’s case, it’s typically Dell Federal Systems, while for Amazon and Google, it tends to be more obscure companies like Four Points Technology or Westwind Computer Products.
When a third party is involved, it’s not clear whether a tech giant knows that their products are being sold to ICE or CBP. It is clear, however, that without their products, the computing infrastructure of America's immigration machine would bear little resemblance to its current form.
Palantir
Some of the most powerful tools at ICE and CBP’s disposal—data analysis tools that bring together information typically stored across many different federal databases—can often be traced back to Palantir.
Palantir has developed a variety of data management and analytics software platforms for ICE, federal records reviewed by WIRED show. While Palantir does not appear to have done any work for CBP since 2013, ICE has relied on the company’s products since 2011.
In 2014, Palantir created ICE’s Investigative Case Management (ICM) system, a version of the company’s off-the-shelf product Gotham. In a 2016 DHS privacy impact assessment, the agency says that Palantir’s ICM—which the assessment describes as ICE’s “core law enforcement case management tool”—stores "criminal and civil investigative case files," helps facilitate information-sharing with CBP, and performs "investigative research" on systems "both internal and external to ICE and DHS."
The assessment adds that the ICM is primarily used by agents with Homeland Security Investigations (HSI), ICE’s criminal investigative arm. According to a slide presentation uploaded to SAM in July 2023, the ICM was used by about 10,000 people globally.
The total extent of what the ICM can do is unclear, but known use cases for Gotham may provide clues. Police departments have used Gotham to centralize evidence, search for suspects using physical traits like tattoos or scars, and hypothesize about individuals’ relationships and possible gang membership. Military customers, meanwhile, use it to plan troop movements, monitor their surveillance tools, and identify targets on the “kill chain.”
As WIRED reported last April, ICE paid Palantir $30 million to build another tool, the Immigration Lifecycle Operating System, or ImmigrationOS, to help the agency choose who to deport and keep track of people who were removed from the US or chose to leave voluntarily.
A Palantir spokesperson tells WIRED that ImmigrationOS has “the same core infrastructure” as “Enhanced Lead Identification and Targeting Enforcement” (ELITE), a new app developed by the company. According to documentation DHS published in January, ELITE has been in use since June. 404 Media reported that the app can create on-the-spot dossiers about possible deportation targets, including a “confidence score” of whether a person may reside at a particular address. The DHS documentation says that ELITE uses AI to more easily access “unstructured, hard‑to‑read address information in records like rap sheets and warrants,” and claims that officers “review and validate the AI-driven outputs” before acting on them.
ICE has also been using a new Palantir-developed tool designed to “review and categorize incoming tips” submitted to the agency, as reported by WIRED. The tool, which has been in use since June 2025, is also designed to produce brief summaries of these tips, and translate those that are not in English.
Palantir also developed the tool that preceded it, the FALCON Tipline, which existed under a larger “IT environment” the agency referred to as “FALCON.” (ICE has never revealed whether FALCON was an acronym.) While active, FALCON also included at least two other tools built by Palantir: one that stored and analyzed trade data, and one that ingested data from various internal databases and made it searchable.
ICE announced in 2022 that it would be replacing FALCON, which a 2023 DHS report clarified would be a tool built internally. A Palantir spokesperson confirms with WIRED that the FALCON environment had been “retired.”
Jake Laperruque, deputy director of the Center for Democracy and Technology's Security and Surveillance Project, tells WIRED that while Palantir isn’t the company harvesting people’s data, it enables ICE to analyze data it obtains from other sources. In doing so, it enables the agency’s larger surveillance apparatus.
“The overriding theme that we've seen for a long time, and especially over the last year, is this ‘collect it all’ mentality. ‘Let's grab as much as we can, we will find ways to use it,’” Laperruque says. “And if we have it all, we'll be able to define what we need.”
With the exception of ImmigrationOS and ELITE, all of these tools predate the second Trump administration. However, the extent of the data ICE has access to, and these tools could potentially work with, has expanded over the past year. “This administration is trying to aggregate those different data sources for the purpose of immigration enforcement, despite the fact that that information was not collected for the purpose of immigration enforcement,” says Jeramie Scott, senior counsel and director of the Electronic Privacy Information Center's Surveillance Oversight Program. “Doing that undermines the trust in government.”
In the weeks since federal immigration enforcement agents killed Renee Good and Alex Pretti in Minneapolis, some Palantir employees have asked questions about the ethics and business logic of selling to ICE, and requested more information about the company’s relationship with the agency. In early February, WIRED reported, CEO Alex Karp recorded a video for Palantir employees about the company's work for ICE that shared very little information. Employees were told that if they were interested in learning more, they could sign an NDA.
DHS, ICE, and CBP did not respond to WIRED's requests for comment.
Microsoft
ICE and CBP use both Microsoft’s Azure cloud storage and Microsoft 365. Broadly speaking, there appears to be more public-facing information about how ICE uses Microsoft’s products and services compared to CBP.
Some payment descriptions on FPDS reveal that ICE uses Azure to help run the Office of the Chief Information Officer (OCIO), which is in charge of IT systems throughout ICE, and the Office of the Principal Legal Advisor, where ICE lawyers litigate "all removal cases including those against criminal aliens, terrorists, and human rights abusers.”
Azure also powers “daily operations” for ICE’s Homeland Security Investigations Technical Operations team, according to FPDS records. ICE’s website says that technical enforcement officers use "electronic surveillance devices like telephone, video, audio, tracking, radio frequency technologies and associated surveillance systems" during "high-risk" criminal investigations.
FPDS and SAM documents rarely provide much insight into how exactly ICE is using particular Microsoft 365 products. However, there are some hints about how ICE uses Dynamics 365, a suite of AI-powered tools that Microsoft claims can help companies manage supply chains and other operations.
On FPDS, ICE claimed it purchased Dynamics 365 to support an order titled “Scalable Ways to Implement Flexible Tasks (SWIFT).” In a performance of work document uploaded to SAM in 2022, ICE says SWIFT involves automating miscellaneous tasks across the agency.
ICE has also purchased at least two “licenses,” which could refer to licenses for Microsoft Azure, Microsoft 365 Enterprise, or something else. These licenses are for Enforcement and Removal Operations and HSI’s Cyber and Operational Technology Unit (COTU), which oversees both the investigation of “cyber-enabled” crimes like child exploitation and data sharing to law enforcement agencies within and outside of DHS.
The payment description that mentions COTU also names the “CALEA Network,” seemingly a reference to the Communications Assistance for Law Enforcement Act, the federal law requiring telecommunications providers to design their networks so that law enforcement can wiretap calls. The description does not specify how Microsoft may support CALEA compliance.
ICE has also purchased at least one “customized” training session for staff on using Microsoft Teams. Details on FPDS revealed that the training would be focused on developing "documents" for the management office of the 287(g) program, which deputizes enrolled state and local agencies to work with ICE. “Automated documents" are also mentioned, but nothing on FPDS reveals exactly what those may be, or what role they play in the 287(g) program.
Christopher Muhawe, an assistant professor of law at the University of Illinois Chicago—who has studied the psychological effects of the American immigration surveillance infrastructure—argues that people seeking asylum or refugee status in the US, including the “security and survival” it could provide, are “inherently vulnerable” to the federal immigration surveillance state, and can cause anxiety and “advanced harm to someone's health.”
“There are no adequate protections to these individuals,” Muhawe says.
Microsoft did not return WIRED’s request for comment.
Amazon
Both CBP and ICE use Amazon cloud storage in support of their operations.
Federal payment records reveal that ICE is a customer of Amazon’s “GovCloud,” a version of AWS that the company says has heightened security specifications for “sensitive workloads.” According to a slide presentation uploaded to SAM, the federal award management system, in July 2023, Palantir’s ICM runs on AWS.
The same document says that Amazon also powers “ICE Cloud,” a crucial piece of infrastructure for the agency. ICE Cloud hosts the agency’s “Digital Records Manager,” “Data Warehouse,” and the “Law Enforcement Information Sharing Service” (LEIS Service), according to the 2023 slide presentation. DHS described the LEIS Service in 2019 as “a backend super highway data sharing system” between ICE and other law enforcement agencies.
The 2023 slide presentation shows that ICE Cloud also hosts the “PRIME Interface Hub,” which DHS says “transmits queries to and from” two other locations. The first is ICE’s Enforcement Integrated Database, which DHS says contains “investigation, arrest, booking, detention, and removal” records for people encountered or apprehended by ICE, CBP, or US Citizenship and Immigration Services. The second is “TECS” (which DHS says is not currently an acronym, but once stood for the “Treasury Enforcement Communications System”), CBP’s “information-sharing platform” that allows authorized users to access CBP databases with information about anyone who entered the US by plane, ship, car, or on foot, and any assets seized at the border.
Amazon also powers ICE’s “Student and Exchange Visitor Program Automated Information Management System,” according to a September 2025 transaction. This appears to be either a functionality within, or another term for, the Student and Exchange Visitor Information System, which stores information about people studying in the US.
Two FPDS payments—despite being made in 2020 and 2022, prior to the period WIRED examined—are significant enough to warrant mention. They revealed that Amazon was providing infrastructure for ICE’s Repository for Analytics in a Virtualized Environment (RAVEn), a tool for agents to analyze “raw or unevaluated datasets”—including documents, photos, audio, and other data—over a dozen federal databases. A DHS Office of the Inspector General report from 2023 describes RAVEn as an “internally developed” tool. It includes a primary “search and analytic tool,” a tool for sharing “lead referrals and outcomes” across HSI field offices, and a mobile app.
RAVEn was intended at its inception to be a replacement for Palantir’s FALCON. A Palantir spokesperson confirmed this, adding, “as we understand it, after several years, RAVEn is no longer serviceable, having run into both cost and functionality challenges.”
A version of the 2026 DHS Appropriations Act considered by the House of Representatives in January includes a provision claiming that HSI has “outstanding briefing requirements and requests related to RAVEn development and deployment that are overdue by more than one year.” It’s unclear whether Amazon has continued to support RAVEn.
According to a payment on FPDS, Amazon has also given CBP access to “AWS Elemental Live,” which provides technical infrastructure for livestreams. However, there isn’t much additional information about what Amazon helps the agency do.
In February, dozens of “community members, activists and Amazon employees” gathered outside the company’s corporate headquarters in Seattle to protest the company’s work with ICE, the Seattle Times reported.
Amazon did not return WIRED’s request for comment.
Both ICE and CBP use Google’s cloud environment to help run their operations, though the payment descriptions for the ICE contracts reveal relatively little about how and where Google’s tech is being used when compared with those from CBP. According to payment descriptions on FPDS, CBP uses Google Cloud to run its “Enterprise Cloud Services Division,” which the agency describes as “a Cloud governance body with authority over Cloud infrastructure and Cloud service.”
Google has also helped CBP use generative AI for “Document Summarization and Content Generation” since March of last year, alongside Meta, OpenAI, and Anthropic, according to DHS documentation. It’s unclear, however, what specific documents are being summarized or the CBP office that’s involved.
According to a SAM entry last updated in February 2025, CBP’s cloud-based “Modular Google Environment” (MAGE) supports the “current infrastructure” of one of its surveillance systems. The entry relates to CBP’s “Integrated Fixed Towers,” the 10-foot surveillance towers that help the agency surveil remote areas of Arizona. In one environmental review, the agency said it was using the towers to find and apprehend terrorists, people crossing the border illegally, and anyone smuggling “humans, drugs, and other contraband.”
Dave Maass, the Electronic Frontier Foundation's investigations director who has studied CBP’s surveillance hardware, tells WIRED that it's unclear exactly how much CBP may rely on Google for its existing operations. He adds that it’s also been historically difficult to evaluate the effectiveness of CBP’s surveillance tower program.
“I've never gotten the sense that the Border Patrol has had a problem of finding people at the border,” Maass says. “If anything, they have a problem finding where they're going to house these people.”
Earlier this month, more than 800 Google employees signed a petition demanding the company to disclose and cancel all of its contracts with ICE and CBP.
Google did not return WIRED’s request for comment.