Palantir Held a Hackathon About ICE and Its Own Employees Aren't Happy About It

What Happened

Palantir, the data analytics firm that has become one of the most controversial technology companies in America, held a hack week this spring with a very specific focus: its work with the Department of Homeland Security and Immigration and Customs Enforcement. According to documents reviewed by WIRED, the event brought together engineers from across the company to build new oversight and auditing tools for platforms being used in the Trump administration's immigration crackdown.

The tools developed during the week give organisations such as DHS and ICE greater visibility into how their workers use Palantir's software. Administrators can set up alerts for what the company describes as concerning behaviour, things like exfiltrating datasets, and search through the session logs of individual users to see exactly what information they've been accessing and when. Some of these tools have already been deployed. Others are set to roll out later this year.

Palantir declined to comment.

The Company Line

Ted Mabrey, the head of Palantir's commercial business, sent an email to staff in early May framing the hack week as an act of courage rather than complicity.

"This effort embodies the culture of the Palantir that I chose to work at," he wrote. "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."

It's a striking message essentially telling employees who have moral concerns about the company's ICE work that the right response is to channel their energy into building better products for ICE, rather than questioning whether Palantir should be doing the work at all.

What Palantir Is Actually Building for ICE

To understand why this is generating so much internal friction, it helps to know the scale of what Palantir has been building for immigration enforcement.

Last year, WIRED reported that ICE paid Palantir $30 million to build a product called Immigration OS, a system designed to provide near real-time visibility on self-deportations out of the United States. The company also reportedly built a separate tool called ELITE Enhanced Leads Identification and Targeting for Enforcement that generates maps of individuals who have been targeted for deportation.

In February, DHS signed a $1 billion purchasing agreement with Palantir, making it easier for all branches of the agency, including ICE, to access the company's products. And on May 6, Palantir announced internally that it had received its first full task order under that agreement, officially extending the Immigration OS pilot into a full product running through spring 2027. Public contracting records show DHS paid $86 million for that extension.

The Employees Who Are Not on Board

The hack week didn't happen in a vacuum. It came after months of growing internal unrest over Palantir's immigration work.

Earlier this year, a Minneapolis nurse named Alex Pretti was shot and killed by federal agents. Internal Slack messages reviewed by WIRED show employees openly questioning the ethics of the company's work in the immediate aftermath.

"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 who consistently check in with authorities. Literally no reason to be rounded up. Surely we aren't helping do that?"

It's a question that cuts to the core of the tension inside the company and one that a hackathon producing better audit logs doesn't really answer. Oversight tools that show how ICE agents are using Palantir software don't change what that software is being used to do.

The Bigger Question

Palantir has always occupied an uncomfortable space in the tech industry, a company that positions itself as a defender of Western values while building the data infrastructure for some of the most scrutinised government operations in the country. Its CEO, Alex Karp, has been vocal about the company's belief that powerful technology in the hands of democratic governments is a net good for the world.

A lot of Palantir's employees clearly share that belief. But a growing number are struggling with the gap between the principle and the practice, between believing in accountable government and watching their work used in operations that have, by any objective measure, swept up people who posed no threat to anyone.

Building better audit tools is nothing. But for employees asking whether Palantir should be doing this work at all, it isn't really an answer either.