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ICE is using Palantir to mine Medicaid data for deportation targets [1]

['Ellsworth Toohey']

Date: 2026-01-26  

Immigration and Customs Enforcement is deploying a Palantir-developed surveillance tool called ELITE — Enhanced Leads Identification & Targeting for Enforcement — that pulls from Department of Health and Human Services databases, including Medicaid records, to build dossiers on potential deportation targets, according to the Electronic Frontier Foundation.

The tool creates maps populated with potential targets and generates "confidence scores" for each person's current address. When EFF previously warned about government data consolidation into "a single searchable, AI-driven interface," this is apparently what they meant.

"This plan runs roughshod over your privacy and security," said EFF Executive Director Cindy Cohn. The organization is pursuing multiple legal strategies — challenging ICE's access to Medicaid data, suing over DOGE agents grabbing personnel data, and filing briefs against ICE's access to taxpayer records. But EFF says litigation alone isn't enough and is calling for congressional action.

The system means that seeking healthcare could make someone a target. People who signed up for Medicaid to get medical treatment are now having that data fed into a deportation machine built by Peter Thiel's company.

Previously:

• ICE enlists Palantir to track down people it wants gone

• ICE uses Facebook's backend to hunt their prey, with help from Palantir

• Government quietly builds massive database tracking all US citizens

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[1] Url: https://boingboing.net/2026/01/26/ice-is-using-palantir-to-mine-medicaid-data-for-deportation-targets.html

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