ICE agent testifies under oath in Oregon federal court that the Palantir-built ELITE targeting app drove an 8-arrests-per-day quota and produced leads that were 'generally not accurate'

During a December 2, 2025 evidentiary hearing in the federal class-action suit M-J-M-A v. Wamsley (U.S. District Court for the District of Oregon), an ICE agent identified in court records only by the initials “JB” testified under oath that his team — roughly nine to twelve officers operating under the DHS sweep code-named Operation Black Rose — had received a verbal instruction to make eight arrests per day. When Innovation Law Lab’s attorney asked whether the agent had complied with the “quota,” the government’s own lawyer objected to the word; Judge Mustafa Kasubhai overruled the objection, and the agent confirmed he had met the target. The sworn testimony directly contradicts DHS officials’ repeated public denials that any arrest quota exists. The testimony was first reported in full by The Guardian on March 13, 2026 and corroborated by IBTimes UK, Techdirt, and Biometric Update.

The same testimony surfaced the operational role of ELITE — Enhanced Leads Identification and Targeting for Enforcement — a targeting application built and maintained by Palantir under a roughly $29.9 million federal contract running from September 2025 through at least 2026. ELITE flagged neighborhoods and individuals for enforcement; on October 30, 2025 ICE staged unmarked vehicles outside an apartment complex in Woodburn, a heavily agricultural community south of Portland, after ELITE flagged the area. The leads it produced were shown to be unreliable: JB’s team recorded — inaccurately — that a farmworker had entered the U.S. unlawfully when she had in fact entered on a valid temporary visa. Judge Kasubhai warned from the bench that the underlying data could be inaccurate and could direct agents toward people who were lawfully present.

On February 5, 2026 Kasubhai ruled that the pattern of warrantless arrests violated the Fourth and Fifth Amendments and enjoined ICE in Oregon from detaining anyone for a civil immigration violation without a supervisor-signed administrative warrant, absent a documented, individualized flight-risk finding. Structurally, the episode is a rare instance of the targeting layer of the deportation apparatus being forced into the evidentiary record: a private analytics vendor (Palantir) supplies algorithmic “leads,” a quota converts those leads into an arrest production target, and the resulting errors are laundered into sworn arrest paperwork — the surveillance-to-coercion pipeline made legible, under oath, exactly where the four-needs coalition prefers it stay opaque.