Business
Palantir's ELITE Scores Medicaid Addresses to Find Targets
A federal court ordered warrants before immigration arrests guided by Palantir's ELITE app. Three months later, USDA contracted Palantir to run automated compliance monitoring for federal employees' return to office.
In December 2025, ICE agents testified under oath in an Oregon federal courtroom that a Palantir-built app guided which neighborhoods they targeted for arrests.
The app is called ELITE, short for Enhanced Leads Identification and Targeting for Enforcement. It maps neighborhood-level density of people tagged with an "immigration nexus." Agents pull up individual dossiers: photographs, registration numbers, home addresses, and an Address Confidence Score between 0 and 100.
Those scores draw on a data-sharing agreement between ICE and the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services covering approximately 80 million Medicaid beneficiaries. Per court testimony, the system received addresses from HHS sources, including Medicaid, to build its location rankings.
A Medicaid address, routed through the CMS-ICE agreement, surfaces as a ranked confidence score that tells an agent where to look. Palantir designed that scoring system.
Palantir's January 2026 response called the company "a data processor" with "no active role in any of its customers' data collection efforts." The testimony ran narrower than that: agents described which neighborhoods ELITE targeted, not the pipeline that built the scores.
The Constitutional Finding
ICE officers confirmed under oath in M-J-M-A v. Wamsley that ELITE guided arrest locations, and one agent received verbal orders to make eight arrests per day. On February 5, 2026, the court found that pattern of warrantless detentions violated the Fourth and Fifth Amendments. The ruling ordered ICE to obtain supervisor-signed warrants before civil immigration arrests.
The FISA court reached a parallel finding in March, ruling NSA and FBI filtering tools constitutionally inadequate.
The USDA Contract
Palantir's immigration contracts now exceed $81 million since January 2025. The largest is a $30 million sole-source award for ImmigrationOS, described in procurement records as providing "near real-time visibility" into the "immigration lifecycle." ICE declared Palantir the "only source" capable of delivery.
Three months after the Oregon ruling, USDA activated a $3.9 million Palantir contract on May 1. Contract language covers "real time and continuous compliance monitoring with automated risk or alert generation" for detecting anomalies. The contract can expand to $13.3 million.
The Department of Veterans Affairs has issued a separate request for technology to "passively gather, measure, and report daily occupancy counts" across 311 federal facilities. The VA's phrasing describes headcounts. The USDA contract's alert-generation language suggests individual-level flagging rather than aggregate counting, though neither Palantir nor USDA has detailed the tool's technical scope.
Palantir's "data processor" framing implies a design position the Oregon ruling left untouched: the court addressed how agents act, not what the software computes. The USDA contract's "automated risk or alert generation" language suggests the workforce tool is structured the same way, with Palantir building the flag logic and supervisors deciding what follows.
SSA has not announced a workforce-monitoring contract. When it does, the contract language will show which version of the tool is being replicated: the aggregate headcount the VA requested, or the individual alert generation USDA already runs.