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Palantir hosted a<\/span> hack week this spring to try to turn internal consternation<\/a> over the company\u2019s work with the Department of Homeland Security<\/a> (DHS) and Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) into clearer oversight tools for products used in the Trump administration\u2019s immigration crackdown, according to material reviewed by WIRED.<\/p>\n The new tools provide organizations, including DHS and ICE, more information on how their workers use Palantir software. Organizations can set up alerts for \u201cconcerning behavior,\u201d like exfiltrating datasets, and search the session logs of individual users. They also allow organizations to see which users have viewed specific sets of information.<\/p>\n Palantir declined to comment.<\/p>\n Palantir regularly holds hack weeks<\/a>, challenging engineers from across the company to experiment with and solve problems in its products. This hack week focused on Palantir\u2019s work with DHS and ICE, which has come under fire from both external critics and workers who fear the company\u2019s tools<\/a> are empowering the Trump administration\u2019s immigration crackdown.<\/p>\n \u201cThis effort embodies the culture of the Palantir that I choose to work at,\u201d Ted Mabrey, head of Palantir\u2019s commercial business, wrote in an email to staff in early May. \u201cYou have the option to slam cynical emojis in slack channels, distrust your colleagues, and choose to think that narrative-motivated outsiders lying about Palantir\u2019s work are more honest than the people showing up to do that work every day. Or you can have the courage to engage and innovate.\u201d<\/p>\n Bringing together employees from across Palantir, this year\u2019s hack week focused on building new tools to provide additional oversight over user behavior on platforms like Foundry, the company\u2019s data integration and analysis tool<\/a>.<\/p>\n Palantir\u2019s work with ICE has grown enormously over the last year. Last year, WIRED reported that ICE paid the company $30 million to build a product called \u201cImmigrationOS\u201d<\/a> that would provide \u201cnear real-time visibility\u201d on self-deportations out of the US. It\u2019s also been reported<\/a> that the company built a separate tool called Enhanced Leads Identification & Targeting for Enforcement (ELITE) that creates maps of individuals who have been targeted for deportation<\/a>.<\/p>\n Some of the new tools created during hack week have already been deployed, with others set to roll out later this year, according to an email reviewed by WIRED. (\u201cThese tools materially expand the usability of Audit logs and checkpoints,\u201d wrote one team lead, \u201cnot just on [Palantir\u2019s DHS contract], but anywhere Foundry operates in high-sensitivity environments.\u201d)<\/p>\n \u201cThis hack week demonstrated that Palantir can convert internal attention around work [on the DHS contract] into additional platform-level safeguards,\u201d the team lead wrote in the May email. \u201cRather than turning away from challenging work, commercial FDEs [forward deployed engineers] across the company wanted to jump into the breach.\u201d<\/p>\n Palantir\u2019s involvement with ICE faced harsh internal backlash earlier this year after Minneapolis nurse Alex Pretti was shot and killed by federal agents. Internal Slack chats reviewed by WIRED<\/a> showed employees questioning the ethics behind the work and demanding more transparency into it.<\/p>\n \u201cCan Palantir put any pressure on ICE at all?\u201d one worker wrote at the time. \u201cI\u2019ve read stories of folks rounded up who were seeking asylum with no order to leave the country, no criminal record, and consistently check in with authorities. Literally no reason to be rounded up. Surely we aren\u2019t helping do that?\u201d<\/p>\n<\/div>\n