A 98.95 Confidence Score Cannot Issue a Warrant

ICE officers testified under oath in December 2025 that Palantir's ELITE application identified their arrest locations during Oregon operations that a federal judge later ruled unconstitutional.

What the Score Measures

Palantir built ELITE under a $29.9 million contract awarded in September 2025. The system assigns each subject a dossier and an "Address Confidence Score between 0 and 100." Example scores in the user guide obtained by 404 Media reach 98.95.

Those scores draw from government and commercial feeds. An ICE data-sharing agreement with CMS put roughly 80 million Medicaid patient records into the pipeline. Thomson-Reuters's CLEAR commercial database and USCIS records also feed in.

A California federal court denied a challenge to the CMS agreement in December 2025; it remains in force.

ELITE also operates at the neighborhood level. The tool renders a geospatial heat map described in court documents as "kind of like Google Maps." It shades areas by density of residents carrying an "immigration nexus" label broad enough to include naturalized citizens.

ICE assistant director Matthew Elliston told the Border Security Expo in Phoenix that ELITE raised the agency's hit rate at predicted addresses from 27 percent to nearly 80 percent. A May 2026 report put the system's combined feeds at 30 to 40 datasets, with agents carrying access to records on 20 million people.

In a January 2026 blog post, Palantir wrote that ELITE is "used for prioritized enforcement to surface the likely addresses of specific individuals" with final orders or high-severity charges. The company added that its platforms "make them exceptionally poor tools for abuse." On the February 2 earnings call, CEO Alex Karp told analysts the product "requires people to conform with Fourth Amendment data protections."

The Oregon Record

In M-J-M-A v. Wamsley, ICE officer "JB" testified to verbal orders of eight arrests per day during Operation Black Rose in Portland. On October 30, 2025, agents raided a Woodburn, Oregon apartment complex under that operation; the person arrested there became a named plaintiff.

On February 5, 2026, Judge Kasubhai issued a preliminary injunction blocking warrantless civil immigration arrests in Oregon. He found the operations violated the Fourth and Fifth Amendments and required ICE to document an individualized flight-risk finding before any civil immigration stop.

Palantir wrote that ELITE surfaces addresses of "specific individuals...with final orders of removal." Kasubhai found ICE conducting quota-driven sweeps of neighborhoods mapped by immigration nexus density, without individualized arrest findings. A confidence score is not a warrant.

The ruling reveals a gap Palantir's own framing created. Karp put the company's Fourth Amendment compliance on the earnings record on February 2; three days later, Kasubhai found the operations ELITE guided to be unconstitutional.

The $29.9 million ELITE contract is a rounding error against Palantir's $1.855 billion in 2025 US government revenue. But DHS signed a $1 billion sole-source blanket purchasing agreement with Palantir on February 23, eighteen days after Kasubhai's ruling, covering Gotham and Foundry licenses across all DHS components. Whether Kasubhai's constitutional standard travels into that agreement is the exposure the contract value does not show.

The injunction covers Oregon. Any appeal runs to the Ninth Circuit, which covers nine states. If Kasubhai's standard holds through appeal, Elliston's 80 percent becomes a metric attached to an enforcement method that cannot legally operate across the western United States.