Palantir Hack Week Adds New ICE Software Controls

Palantir held a spring hack week aimed at transforming internal employee unease over its work with the Department of Homeland Security and Immigration and Customs Enforcement into concrete oversight features for its software, according to documents reviewed by WIRED. The initiative responds to growing tension surrounding the company’s role in the Trump administration’s immigration enforcement efforts.

The resulting tools give organizations, including DHS and ICE, greater visibility into how their personnel interact with Palantir’s platforms. Users can now configure alerts for “concerning behavior,” such as unauthorized data exfiltration, and review session logs for individual employees. Administrators also gain the ability to see which users have accessed specific datasets. Palantir declined to comment on the hack week or the new features.

Palantir routinely organizes hack weeks, inviting engineers from across the company to experiment and tackle product challenges. This year’s event zeroed in on the company’s contracts with DHS and ICE, which have drawn sharp criticism from both outside activists and internal staff who worry the technology is fueling an aggressive immigration crackdown.

“This effort embodies the culture of the Palantir that I choose to work at,” Ted Mabrey, head of Palantir’s commercial business, wrote in a staff email in early May. “You have the option to slam cynical emojis in slack channels, distrust your colleagues, and choose to think that narrative-motivated outsiders lying about Palantir’s work are more honest than the people showing up to do that work every day. Or you can have the courage to engage and innovate.”

The hack week brought together employees from across the organization to build new oversight capabilities for platforms like Foundry, Palantir’s flagship data integration and analysis tool. These features aim to address internal concerns by providing more robust monitoring of user activity.

Palantir’s relationship with ICE has expanded rapidly. Last year, WIRED reported that ICE paid Palantir $30 million to develop a product called ImmigrationOS, designed to offer “near real-time visibility” into self-deportations from the United States. Additionally, the company built a separate tool, Enhanced Leads Identification & Targeting for Enforcement (ELITE), which generates maps of individuals flagged for deportation.

Some of the hack week innovations have already been deployed, with additional features expected to roll out later this year, according to an email reviewed by WIRED. “These tools materially expand the usability of Audit logs and checkpoints,” one team lead wrote, “not just on [Palantir’s DHS contract], but anywhere Foundry operates in high-sensitivity environments.”

“This hack week demonstrated that Palantir can convert internal attention around work [on the DHS contract] into additional platform-level safeguards,” the same team lead noted in the May email. “Rather than turning away from challenging work, commercial FDEs [forward deployed engineers] across the company wanted to jump into the breach.”

Internal backlash against Palantir’s ICE work intensified earlier this year after Minneapolis nurse Alex Pretti was shot and killed by federal agents. Leaked internal Slack messages revealed employees questioning the ethical implications of the company’s involvement and demanding greater transparency. “Can Palantir put any pressure on ICE at all?” one worker wrote. “I’ve read stories of folks rounded up who were seeking asylum with no order to leave the country, no criminal record, and consistently check in with authorities. Literally no reason to be rounded up. Surely we aren’t helping do that?”