World
ELITE Scored Deportation Targets by Medicaid Address Data
Palantir's ELITE system replaced ICE's static case-file addresses with live probability scores drawn from 80 million Medicaid records, under a July 2025 CMS agreement whose stated purpose was enforcement, reversing the agency's own prior promise to applicants. DHS deployed it without a single required privacy disclosure.
ICE officers confirmed under oath in December that Palantir's ELITE system identified arrest locations during Operation Black Rose. The five-month Portland-area sweep deployed more than 100 federal agents and produced more than 1,100 arrests across Oregon between September 27, 2025, and March 1, 2026.
The testimony came from M-J-M-A v. Wamsley, a federal class-action case reported in full by The Guardian on March 13, 2026. ICE cited Oregon's sanctuary law, which bars local resources from immigration enforcement, as the reason the operation required that scale. A federal judge ruled on February 5, 2026, that the warrantless arrest pattern violated the Fourth and Fifth Amendments.
Before ELITE
Before ELITE, ICE officers worked from addresses individuals had self-reported on visa applications, court filings, and immigration registration forms. FALCON, Palantir's investigative analytics platform at ICE since 2012, let analysts search across government datasets. It produced no probability score on whether a self-reported address was still current.
ELITE replaces those static fields with a live calculation. Selecting a name produces a dossier with a photograph, alien registration number, and an Address Confidence Score between 0 and 100. Court exhibits from the Oregon case showed scores ranging from 77.25 to 98.95, weighted by data source and recency. The score tells officers how likely a person is still at a given address. Officers use it to triage which locations are worth serving with an administrative arrest warrant.
ELITE's map identified "target-rich" zones; each team's eight-arrest daily quota was met by moving through those clusters, according to a December 2025 analysis. No public document discloses a minimum score threshold below which officers stand down.
The addresses feeding the score come from Medicaid enrollment records. CMS and ICE signed a data-sharing agreement in July 2025. The November 2025 Federal Register notice formalizing the arrangement stated that ICE would receive data to "identify and locate aliens in the United States", enforcement as the named purpose from the start. That reversed a prior CMS commitment to applicants: "We won't use any immigration status you share with us for immigration enforcement purposes." ICE now queries records on roughly 80 million patients.
The Money Trail
Palantir received a $30 million contract in April 2025 (Federal Contract 70CTD022FR0000170) to build ImmigrationOS, the AI platform underlying ICE's removal workflow. A separate $29.9 million ELITE maintenance contract followed in September 2025. In February 2026, DHS extended Palantir's reach with a $1 billion no-bid blanket purchase agreement covering CBP, ICE, FEMA, and CISA.
The Disclosure That Did Not Happen
The E-Government Act of 2002 requires a Privacy Impact Assessment before any federal IT system collecting public data goes live. DHS filed 24 PIAs in 2024 and 8 in 2025.
Through May 2026, it has filed zero. ELITE was deployed without one.
On April 14, Rep. Dan Goldman (D-NY), Sen. Ron Wyden (D-OR), and Rep. Nydia Velázquez (D-NY) sent DHS a letter demanding documentation on Palantir contracts and data-sharing terms. Wyden is Oregon's senior senator. The DHS Inspector General, separately, has accused the agency of "obstructing audits" of its biometric data management activities.
The reversal exposes what the prior assurance had obscured: the address entered to establish Medicaid eligibility was already the most current location record the federal government held on those patients. The July 2025 agreement moved it into an arrest-location scoring system, with enforcement stated as the purpose, no privacy disclosures, and no notice to the people whose records changed function.
The $1 billion Palantir ceiling runs to September 30. If DHS files no PIA by then, the contract completes without the disclosure required by federal law. The E-Government Act will have been optional.