DHS expands Palantir-powered ICE dragnet

The Trump administration is scaling US immigration enforcement the way modern states scale everything else: by wiring up data systems, outsourcing core functions to contractors, and then treating due process as an optional feature.

Wired reports that the Department of Homeland Security has opened what amounts to a billion-dollar tab with Palantir, expanding the company’s role in Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) operations. Palantir’s software has long been used for case management and data integration across immigration enforcement; the new agreement signals that the administration is not merely continuing that model but industrializing it.

At the same time, DHS is widening the legal aperture for detention. According to The Guardian, a new DHS memo instructs immigration officers to arrest refugees who have been lawfully admitted to the United States but have not yet obtained permanent residence (a green card), and to hold them during “aggressive rescreening.” The memo frames refugee admission as “conditional” and claims a “mandatory review after one year” justifies arrest and custody, explicitly reversing Obama-era guidance from 2010 that treated failure to apply for a green card within a year as insufficient grounds for detention.

The operational target is not small. The Guardian cites “Operation Parris” in Minnesota, aimed at roughly 5,600 refugees who had not become permanent residents. The memo reportedly authorizes detention “for the duration of the inspection and examination process”—a phrase that, in any bureaucracy with incentives to prolong review, reads like a recipe for open-ended confinement.

This is not occurring in a legal vacuum. The Guardian notes that a federal judge in Minneapolis, John Tunheim, recently blocked further arrests of settled refugees in Minnesota and ordered the release of at least 100 people already detained, emphasizing that refugees have “a legal right to be in the United States” and to live peacefully. Yet DHS’s memo appears designed to bulldoze that ruling by rebranding mass arrests as compliance with “incomplete” guidance.

The friction is increasingly visible in court. DNyuz reports a federal judge held a Justice Department attorney in contempt for refusing to return paperwork needed by an ICE detainee for immigration proceedings—an unusually direct judicial rebuke that highlights a recurring dynamic: the state can often “win” by delay, even when it loses on the merits.

Put these pieces together and you get a coherent architecture: (1) an expanding data-and-workflow layer (Palantir), (2) a detention policy that treats legal presence as provisional, and (3) procedural sabotage that makes court orders expensive to enforce. The lesson is not that government sometimes overreaches. It’s that, once built, an enforcement machine will look for throughput—and contractors will happily invoice for every new gear added.

Even the politics have a grim symmetry. The Guardian cites a Quinnipiac poll showing Trump’s immigration approval at 38% in February, down from 44% in December. The state’s answer to declining public confidence is not restraint; it is capacity expansion.