U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement tried to share voter data with Palantir for entry into ELITE, according to internal government documents reviewed by Democracy Docket. As of this summer, ICE was waiting for Palantir to load the records into the system built for immigration enforcement operations.
The files point to voters in Missouri, Michigan, New Mexico, Connecticut, Georgia and Kentucky, with a July internal report saying the information from those six states was pending Palantir entry into ELITE. That makes the episode more than a narrow records exchange. It ties election-related data to a tool used across ICE operations, and it does so on the eve of the midterms.
ELITE was developed by Palantir for ICE, and Homeland Security Investigations made reports for other parts of the Department of Homeland Security as part of a broader search for illegal voting by noncitizens. The documents were obtained by Democracy Forward through a Freedom of Information Act lawsuit against ICE, showing how the data came into view only after a legal fight over records.
But one key point remains unresolved. It is not clear that the voter data ever made it into ELITE, and a source familiar with the matter said plainly, “This data was not and is not integrated into ELITE.” The documents also do not say exactly where ICE got the voter records, or what portion of the information iLab added before the material was set aside for Palantir.
That gap matters because court filings claim ICE has stored dossiers on people who observe its enforcement operations in ELITE, including photos, license plate numbers and other personal information. If voter records were only pending entry, the system still became part of an election-adjacent effort that political allies of President Donald Trump have pushed hard, even as Trump and his supporters have repeatedly and wrongly said noncitizen voting is widespread. Peter Thiel, who funded Trump's 2016 campaign, once wrote, “I no longer believe that freedom and democracy are compatible,” a line that hangs over any expansion of this kind of database work.
What the documents show, then, is not just an attempt to collect voter data but an attempt to route it into a surveillance tool already central to ICE. Whether Palantir ever finished the job is the unanswered question, and it is the one that will determine how far the government went before the records stopped at the edge of ELITE.
