So over the past year, about 230,000 people were arrested in the United States by ICE and deported by the Trump administration. That's more than the total number of deportes during President Biden's entire 4-year term. Now, under Trump's immigration crackdown, ICE agents are picking people off the streets and from their homes at a very high rate.
But what tools are enabling them to target neighborhoods? Joseph Cox is the founder of 404 media and has done extensive reporting on the federal agency and its expanding surveillance technologies. He speaks to Hari Shinavasan about the role of Palunteer in facilitating all of this.
>> Paulo, thanks. Joseph Cox, thanks so much for joining us. You and your team at 404 have been doing a series of stories about how technology is being used in the mass deportations and the raids that we're seeing around the country by ICE.
Um, one of your most recent articles was titled Elite, the Palunteer app ICE uses to find neighborhoods to raid. In it, you write, "Palanteer is working on a tool for immigration and customs enforcement that populates a map with potential deportation targets, brings up a dossier on each person, and provides a confidence score on the person's current address. Now, you've learned that uh ICE is using it to find locations where lots of people it might detain could be based.
How does this work? So, it is a map interface and an ICE official will simply draw a circle or a square onto that map and all of these small pins will appear. They'll then click onto one of those pins and that will be a specific person or an ISIS sort of vernacular, a target.
That'll be their name, date of birth, a photo if they have it, and as you said, the address and the address confidence score. Elsewhere in the user guide I obtained explaining how this tool works, it says these addresses can come from the Department of Health and Human Services, USCIS, which is part of DHS, and various other sources as well. It seems to be a tool that brings together data from all of these usually separate places and sources and brings it into a sort of all-in-one single tool that ICE can use to find neighborhoods to raid, maybe write up target lists and eventually supervisors to approve those lists and send people out into the field.
>> So, how did you confirm the connection between ICE and the company Palunteer? So elite is an acronym and then in the user guide the full text of that was spelled out. I then as I usually do when I get leaked documents I started googling around.
The only mention of that spelled out acronym on the entire web was included in a Palunteer contract for 29. 9 million. To me that made a very solid link between this particular tool and Palunteer.
And of course last year we already reported that Palunteer was working on immigration enforcement for the second Trump administration. They were doing various data analytic services and products and that sort of thing. But this was really the first link that we got between oh they're making this specific tool and ICE is using it.
who was finally bridging that divide between Palunteer doing some frankly obscure technology work over here and what is actually happening on American streets. So what is uh elite the acronym stand for? >> Elite stands for enhanced leads identification and targeting for enforcement.
That is a very unique acronym. >> You mentioned that there's a confidence score. So how's that calculated?
According to the user guide, there are two main metrics that dictate or influence that confidence score. The first is the source of that data. So, the department of health or wherever it may come from.
And the second one is the recency as in when was the last time that address was updated. And that's especially important for ICE because when it's trying to find people to detain and deport and those could be, you know, people with no criminal conviction or it could be what they describe as, you know, the most wanted or the worst of the worst or whatever it may be that DHS, it may be however DHS is describing that. Um, those addresses are really, really important for ICE because they can finally try to track down where that specific person may be and that's why they have a confidence score.
They want to be quite efficient in what they're doing. They don't want to be sending personnel around randomly. They do want to find a specific location to go and target and that is what this tool at least hopes to do.
Do you know if this tool has been and is being used in the raids that we're seeing around the country? >> So in December, ICE officials and Customs and Border Protection officials gave really illuminating testimony in a case going on there. It was discussing an immigration raid that happened in October.
They targeted a woman who has the initials MJMA in the court transcripts and about 30 other people as well. And in that testimony, an ICE official explicitly said that they used something called elite, describing how it's used to build up target lists, describing how they went to neighborhoods that they called target rich because there were lots of people there that they could potentially detain. And that was one of the key pieces that allowed me to do this investigation because this is hearing from ICE officials themselves about how they're using this tool, what it's useful for.
Because when I approached DHS for comment on this, they weren't going to readily confirm those details themselves. That testimony has been really, really illuminating not just for this story about Palunteer, but various other ones about the surveillance tech that ICE is using in the field. Is anything that Palunteer is doing today illegal?
>> As far as I know, nothing that Palanteer is doing is illegal. This data sharing between agencies is the fruit of an executive order from President Trump. So, it is legally authorized in that sense.
It's crucial to remember that Palunteer doesn't go out and gather data. They're not performing facial recognition. They're not tracking phones.
All Palanteer does is it seems quite well bring all of this data together so the customer in this case ICE can understand it. >> Just as a note we have reached out to both ICE through the Department of Homeland Security and to Palunteer about your reporting. We haven't received any comments and you mentioned in your reporting that you've reached out multiple times to Palunteer to ICE and they have not gotten back to you.
Correct. Yeah, I have heard back I have heard from the company once or twice over my several months of reporting and usually they say they regret that the leaks have happened rather than commenting on the substance of the leaks themselves. I would say it's much more interesting to look at what they say internally of course and Palanteer justifies its work with ICE by saying it believes it can make ISIS's work more efficient, more transparent, more accountable.
Ultimately, ICE is the one deciding how to use this technology, if they use it at all. ICE is the one that decides we're going to detain this person or track down people in this neighborhood. Wired recently had an interesting report about internal communications at Palunteer where there were several employees that were very concerned about how the company's products are being used in ICE enforcement.
And quoting from the Wired story now, they uh were talking about an internal wiki, kind of a a reference base inside Palunteer that employees all have access to. And it said the wiki acknowledges quote increasing reporting around US citizens being swept up in enforcement action and held as well as reports of racial profiling allegedly applied as pretense for the detention of some US citizens but argues that Palunteers customers at ICE remain committed to avoiding the unlawful unnecessary targeting apprehension and detention of US citizens wherever and however possible. We should note that Wyard also said that they tried to reach out for comment and did not receive one.
So it's it's interesting that there is kind of this internal tension at least from employees. >> Yeah, we saw this in the first Trump administration as well when Palanteer was doing some work with ICE. It was specifically working on a system called ICM for homeland security investigations.
You know that's the part of ICE which focuses on cyber crime or child abuse or money laundering that sort of thing. Some employees still had an issue then. This time the outrage does seem to be much more visceral.
I would say indicating by the leaks that I've received and why why it has received as well. But employees in the in that company can't necessarily change the policy directives of Palunteer as a whole, especially when you have leadership such as the CEO Karp saying that it is the responsibility of tech companies to help defend the west, defend democracy. Now, of course, myself and I think other people who look into Palunteer as well find that quite a strange thing to marry with the idea that they say they wish to defend American and Western values while also providing the technological infrastructure for the agency that now says it does not need a warrant to enter buildings.
I sincerely try to square that circle and I would love if Palanteer responded to my requests for comments to uh my requests for comment to elaborate on that as well. You've also reported about facial recognition technology and so many people have seen these viral videos where the ICE agent really just sticks his or her phone up directly to the person and kind of takes a snapshot and that phone that they have in their hand is comparing the image to some much much larger database. Um is that effective?
Where did all those pictures come from? So, we first revealed the existence of this app called Mobile Fortify last June thanks to leaked emails from inside ICE. I then steadily got more information over the coming months and essentially it uses the system the Customs and Border Protection has at the border to verify who is entering the country.
It has turned that inwards onto American streets where, as you say, an ICE official or another DHS official can use their phone, point it at someone's face, and instantly query a database of something like 200 million images that DHS has, compares it to those, brings up an interface identifying the person, their name, uh, date of birth, whether they've been given the final order of deportation, all of that sort of thing. and ICE and CPP officials are using this to in an attempt to verify people's citizenship. That said, recently we reported that the app may not always be accurate.
In that earlier case I mentioned of MJMA, the woman in Oregon and who officials testified about when the when a Customs and Border Protection official scanned her face, it returned two different names. When you first learn about facial recognition as a researcher or a journalist, you learn it can be very inaccurate, especially against people of color. We've seen time and time again, black people especially have been misidentified by facial recognition and then they face charges or they've been detained, they've been arrested, they've been put in jail for some time.
That technology is now being used to determine whether somebody should be deported or not. and ICE believes that a result from that app is definitive proof of someone's status and it overrides a birth certificate. Now, >> there's a group of Democratic lawmakers that are trying to rein in the use of Mobile Fortify.
Uh, Representative Benny Thompson who uh authored this legislation. Um, he is the Homeland Security ranking member. He said ISIS's use of mobile Fortify to determine a person's legal status is an outrageous affront to the civil rights and civil liberties of US citizens and immigrants alike.
DHS should not be conducting surveillance by experimenting with Americans faces and fingerprints in the field, especially with unproven and biased technology. What's their legislation proposing? >> So, the aim of the legislation is not to eliminate this app.
It's more to rein it in. And it does that or plans to do that in several different ways. First would the first one would be that DHS cannot use this out on American streets.
It would be restricted to ports of entry into the country. Another is that DHS would not be allowed to roll out a version of the app to local law enforcement, which is what we reported they were planning to do, which would have meant that organizations who are part of the 287G program, basically local law enforcement working with ICE on immigration enforcement in some capacity, they would be allowed to use the app. This legislation would aim to tackle that as well.
So, it wouldn't eliminate it outright, but it would try to rein it in somewhat. >> In another story, uh, you reported through, uh, documents that you obtained through a lawsuit of Freedom of Information request, you found that there was an data sharing agreement between the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services and the Department of Homeland Security. in that agreement that ICE was given the personal data of nearly 80 million Medicaid patients.
What did you discover in the full text of this? >> Yeah, so that agreement really showed the breadth and the depth of the data on Medicaid patients that was being shared with ICE name, address, other sensitive personal information. And I think it just goes to show that ICE as an agency is turning to very novel ways to get information that it is that it believes is useful to its mission.
So as well as that Medicaid data, there is of course the data sharing between the IRS and ICE now which was unprecedented. Of course the idea being that IRS won't share data with ICE so undocumented people will be encouraged to still pay their taxes. That is now out of the window.
You will also have ICE accessing a medical insurance claim database called ISO claim search which to my understanding is nearly all-encompassing of something something like more than 90% of all medical insurance claims that also includes people's addresses and again the idea is to bring addresses from all of these very unusual data sources so ICE can find who it wishes to deport and detain. that is very explicit in these um data sharing agreements. So you know look different databases different information sitting in you know disperate places that was one of the things that led to the greatest terror attack in the United States right after 9/11 this was one of the key goals is hey if you have information over here and it's not connected and talking to this information over here we could have prevented this next attack and that's why we're combining all these data sets.
What is wrong with that thinking or at least how these technologies are being used today? >> I think that's a totally fair point and I would say that the key idea is context and consent as well. Of course, I think when somebody goes to pay their taxes and they provide an address to the IRS, they don't believe or they wouldn't have believed before that that could end up being used for immigration enforcement.
I don't think many people would believe that when they go to try to seek medical help um either through Medicaid or some other mechanism of the department of health, they wouldn't have assumed that that data could then be used for immigration um enforcement as well. And this data sharing between agencies can be beneficial for some things. of course is useful if members of the intelligence community are talking to one another about certain, you know, very high-profile dangerous terrorist threats, for instance.
But crucially, that's not what we're talking about here. We're talking about immigration enforcement as part of a mass deportation campaign, which is unfortunately also targeting US citizens, and they're being pulled out of the houses as well. and people of course being hurt and dragged very indiscriminately.
The context here is very very different to say data sharing in the war on terror. How much of these instances where US citizens are having their doors knocked on so to speak? How much of that is a failure of the technology tools versus the users that are actually putting it to use and not reading the information correctly, not looking at the right confidence scores or is the data just bad?
>> That's a very very interesting question and I think as a combination of both of those and also just a general strategy almost a legal strategy from ICE as well. So in one case recently where a US citizen was pulled out of his home. According to public reporting that I was reading, ICE believed somebody else lived at that address and they potentially moved on at some point.
Now that would be a data issue. The data was not correct about who was at this residence. That said, ICE also believes it can now enter properties without a search warrant.
It believes that does not violate the Fourth Amendment according to a memo the Associated Press obtained. So there are two things there. The data can be wrong, but even if it's wrong, the agency also believes it can enter properties as well.
And I think it's very very hard to decouple those. I I don't think it's one or the other. It would be very easy to simply blame the data.
But the reality is that someone is on the ground acting on that information as well, and they're making a decision either individually or as an agency to do whatever it is they're going out and doing. reporter and co-founder of 404 Media, Joseph Cox. Thanks so much for all your reporting.
>> Absolutely. Thank you so much.
