Brennan Center Authors Say DHS's AI Inventory Leaves ELITE Off Its High-Impact List and Shows HSI Using Sentiment Analysis an ICE Policy Bars

On October 21, Just Security published an analysis by Brennan Center authors Rachel Levinson-Waldman and Eoghan Stafford of DHS’s AI use-case inventory. They say the inventory does not classify the ELITE app as high-impact even though ICE agents use it to find and arrest migrants, and they describe it as using large language models to extract addresses from government records, including Department of Health and Human Services data, and to display them on maps with confidence scores. DHS’s own ICE entry for ELITE says the app extracts address information from criminal records such as rap sheets and warrants, and says its outputs are limited to normalized address data that do not serve as a principal basis for decisions or actions with legal, material, binding, or significant effects on individuals. The authors also say DHS excludes the Investigative Prioritization Aggregator, which ranks HSI suspects, and that an entry titled “Open-Source Intelligence for Investigations” shows HSI software using sentiment analysis, which the authors say an official ICE policy cited in the entry prohibits in law enforcement investigations. DHS’s page for that entry lists sentiment and emotion detection among the platforms’ capabilities. For Mobile Fortify, the authors say DHS answered the monitoring question with “Yes, sufficient monitoring protocols have been established.” They add that DHS’s AI directive permits the chief AI officer to waive any departmental policy governing AI, including any prohibitions on uses.

The Medicaid data transfer to the ELITE app is documented separately in 2026-07-17–ice-medicaid-palantir-illegal-data-transfer. It extends the inventory coverage in 2026-08-06–lawfare-documents-most-ice-ai-tools-absent-from-dhs-public-inventory, 2026-08-14–dhs-ai-inventory-200-use-cases-palantir-elite-confidence-scores-911-ingestion and 2026-08-12–brennan-center-dhs-29b-domestic-surveillance-architecture.