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How Palantir's Confidence Score Became ICE's Warrant
Palantir's ELITE converts federal health records into address-confidence scores, and ICE raids on those numbers as if they were facts. The 27-to-80 percent improvement ICE's own data official cites has no named baseline and no audit.
ICE's top data official told a Phoenix trade expo in early May that Palantir's ELITE system has put 20 million people's records on agents' iPhones. Matthew Elliston, ICE's assistant director of law enforcement systems and analysis, said the platform raised target-location success from roughly 27 percent to nearly 80 percent. Elliston offered no baseline: no predecessor tool was named, no prior method defined, and no measurement period specified.
Palantir's user guide for ELITE describes it as "a targeting tool designed to improve capabilities for identifying and prioritising high-value targets through advanced analytics." In M-J-M-A v. Wamsley, a federal class action in Oregon, court testimony established a gap between that description and the tool's operational function. Agents can draw a circle on any map area; ELITE surfaces "nearby potential targets," allowing officers to expand arrests beyond the original list.
On October 30, 2025, ICE agents parked outside a Woodburn apartment complex after ELITE flagged the neighborhood and detained 31 people. The arrests were part of Operation Black Rose, which produced more than 1,200 total arrests in the Portland area by mid-December 2025. On February 5, 2026, Judge Kasubhai ruled the warrantless arrests violated the Fourth and Fifth Amendments.
Among those detained in Oregon that October: Victor Cruz, a 63-year-old Hillsboro grandfather with a valid work permit. Agents stopped him on October 14 looking for a different man with the same name. He spent three weeks at the Tacoma ICE facility before a court order secured his release.
The Number Behind the Number
ELITE expresses address confidence as a decimal, with documented examples ranging from 77.25 to 98.95 out of 100. EFF's January 2026 investigation found the score derives from Department of Health and Human Services data, a pool that includes records of nearly 80 million Medicaid patients. Palantir disputed portions of EFF's characterization but did not contest that ELITE draws on HHS data.
Palantir's ICE contracts total roughly $160 million and include a sole-source deal to build what ICE calls the Icehouse, due September 2026. On February 17, the company announced it was moving headquarters from Denver to Miami, offering no public explanation. Peter Thiel had opened a Thiel Capital office in Miami the previous December.
The decimal formalizes an untested claim: health-record proximity predicts immigration status precisely enough to justify arrival at a door. ELITE is one layer of a larger apparatus that, as previously documented, also reads encrypted messages on phones no agent has touched.
DHS has requested $7.5 million in its fiscal year 2027 budget for smart glasses that would extend ELITE's biometrics from iPhones to wearable hardware. The department's own language describes the glasses as making identity checks "faster and less conspicuous." The FY2027 markup is where the Elliston figure either gets a disclosure requirement or does not.