Palantir, the synthetic intelligence and knowledge analytics firm, has quietly began engaged on a tech platform for a federal immigration company that has referred dozens of people to U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement for potential enforcement since September.
The U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Providers company—which handles companies together with citizenship functions, household immigration, adoptions, and work permits for non-citizens—began the contract with Palantir on the finish of October, and is paying the info analytics firm to implement “Part 0” of a “vetting of wedding-based schemes,” or “VOWS” platform, in response to the federal contract, which was posted to the U.S. authorities web site and reviewed by Fortune.
The contract is small—lower than $100,000—and particulars of what precisely the brand new platform entails are skinny. The contract itself presents few particulars, other than the overall description of the platform (“vetting of wedding-based schemes”) and an estimate that the completion of the contract can be Dec. 9.Palantir declined to touch upon the contract or nature of the work, and USCIS didn’t reply to requests for remark for this story.
However the contract is notable, nonetheless, because it marks the start of a brand new relationship between USCIS and Palantir, which has had longstanding contracts with ICE, one other company of the Division of Homeland Safety, since not less than 2011. The outline of the contract means that the “VOWS” platform could very nicely be targeted on marriage fraud and associated to USCIS’ current acknowledged effort to drill down on duplicity in functions for marriage and family-based petitions, employment authorizations, and parole-related requests.
USCIS has been outspoken about its current collaboration with ICE. Over 9 days in September, USCIS introduced that it labored with ICE and the Federal Bureau of Investigation to conduct what it referred to as “Operation Twin Defend” within the Minneapolis-St. Paul space, the place immigration officers investigated potential instances of fraud in immigration profit functions the company had obtained. The company reported that its officers referred 42 instances to ICE over the interval. In a press release printed to the USCIS web site shortly after the operation, USCIS director Joseph Edlow mentioned his company was “declaring an all-out battle on immigration fraud” and that it might “relentlessly pursue everybody concerned in undermining the integrity of our immigration system and legal guidelines.”
“Beneath President Trump, we’ll depart no stone unturned,” he mentioned.
Earlier this 12 months, USCIS rolled out updates to its coverage necessities for marriage-based inexperienced playing cards, which have included extra particulars of relationship proof and stricter interview necessities.
Whereas Palantir has all the time been a controversial firm—and one which tends to lean into that popularity no much less—the brand new contract with USCIS is prone to result in extra public scrutiny. Backlash over Palantir’s contracts with ICE have intensified this 12 months amid the Trump Administration’s crackdown on immigration and aggressive ways utilized by ICE to detain immigrants which have gone viral on social media. To not point out, Palantir inked a $30 million contract with ICE earlier this 12 months to pilot a system that can observe people who’ve elected to self-deport and assist ICE with concentrating on and enforcement prioritization. There was pushback from present and former workers of the corporate alike over contracts the corporate has with ICE and Israel.
In a current interview on the New York Occasions DealBook Summit, Palantir CEO Alex Karp was requested on stage about Palantir’s work with ICE and later what Karp thought, from an ethical standpoint, about households getting separated by ICE. “After all I don’t like that, proper? Nobody likes that. No American. That is the fairest, least bigoted, most open-minded tradition on the earth,” Karp mentioned. However he mentioned he cared about two points politically: immigration and “re-establishing the deterrent capability of America with out being a colonialist neocon view. On these two points, this president has carried out.”
