Thirty Lawmakers Demand DHS Answers on Palantir's ELITE and ImmigrationOS as ICE Surveillance Spending Hits $513M

Thirty lawmakers led by Rep. Dan Goldman, Rep. Nydia Velázquez and Sen. Ron Wyden sent DHS a demand letter on April 14, 2026 seeking transparency on two Palantir-developed ICE systems: ELITE, described in court testimony as functioning like Google Maps to identify the neighborhood locations of targeted individuals, and ImmigrationOS, a $30 million AI-enabled platform contracted to give ICE near-real-time visibility into what its own procurement language calls the immigration lifecycle.

The spending figure is the structural fact. Funding awarded to eleven surveillance-technology firms by ICE and CBP doubled from 2024 to 2025, reaching over $310 million, then spiked to $513 million in 2026 — a jump driven specifically by Palantir contracts and by Anduril’s border towers, drones and associated AI systems. Palantir has received over $1.8 billion in federal funding since the start of the second Trump term, including $81 million from ICE in 2025 and $97 million in 2026, followed by a $1 billion purchase agreement.

Sourcing note — attribution corrected at write time. The capture ledger credited the $513M and $310M figures to ACLU. That is wrong, and a mechanical title-figure check caught it: neither figure appears in the ACLU roundup or the Goldman press release. They originate in a separate contract study by Mijente, Just Futures Law and the Surveillance Resistance Lab, tracking ICE and CBP awards to eleven surveillance-technology firms from 2013 to 2026, reported by Truthout on 2026-06-27 and now cited above. The figures have not been reconciled line-by-line against USASpending award records, and a lead to do exactly that is open. Cite them as that study’s findings — not as ACLU’s, and not as government-published totals.

The dates also differ in kind and must not be flattened: the letter is dated April 14, 2026; the spending study reporting the $513M figure was published June 27, 2026. This entry is dated to the letter.

This is the second such letter from substantially the same members — the first went to Palantir CEO Alex Karp in June 2025 (2025-06-17–wyden-goldman-velazquez-letter-karp-palantir-ice-surveillance) — and it lands inside a documented pattern in which the oversight request is the visible artifact and the answer never arrives. The ELITE confidence-score methodology the letter asks about remains undisclosed (2026-08-14–dhs-ai-inventory-200-use-cases-palantir-elite-confidence-scores-911-ingestion), and DHS filed zero privacy impact assessments against the $1 billion no-bid Palantir vehicle (2026-05-13–dhs-zero-privacy-impact-assessments-palantir-1-billion-no-bid). Congress asks; the procurement record stays blank.