In June, when the US Immigration and Customs Enforcement agency (ICE) began separating migrant children from their parents, several tech companies came under fire for providing the agency with the software that helped them do it.
At the center of the criticism was data mining company Palantir, which designed the Investigative Case Management system. The ICM is a critical component of ICE’s deportation operations—it integrates a vast ecosystem of public and private data to track down immigrants and, in many cases, deport them.