ICE Put Protester Photos Into a Palantir Database

Kit Johnson

03 Oct 2026 — 1 min read

In a class action lawsuit related to the DHS action "Operation Catch of the Day" in Maine, newly released documents reveal that ICE agents took photos of immigration protestors and fed them into a Palantir surveillance database. (See, e.g., Yahoo! News; Wired Magazine).

I became aware of issues surrounding ICE and protestors this summer, during the immprof conference at Duke. Prof. Haiyun Damon-Feng (Cardozo) presented her work-in-progress in this topic: "The Unitary Surveillance State." I learned from Haiyun about immigration protestors being intimidated by ICE agents who called them out by name and followed them to their homes--with 100 reports of such conduct in Minnesota alone!

What's new about this week's reveal is how the government went beyond the intimidation tactics above to store information about protestors--with their names, images, addresses, license plate numbers, phone numbers, and "cohabitants" documented. Oh, and special notations like "Threat to Law Enforcement, Professional Protestor."

I get tired of characterizing things as dystopian, but I'm at a loss for any other word. Especially when, as Haiyun writes, "ICE currently has the capacity to access personal identifying information for at least 75% of American adults, and it continues to build up its surveillance arsenal."

Or maybe, the situation is simply American in the sense of everything old being new again. It's a repeat of the FBI's surveillance of "'subversive' civil rights groups and Black leaders" in the 1960s." Just with more tools in the toolbox.

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