ICE Utilizes Palantir’s AI Solutions to Analyze Tips

United States Immigration and Customs Enforcement is utilizing Palantir’s generative artificial intelligence tools to organize and summarize immigration enforcement tips from its public submission form, as detailed in an inventory released Wednesday regarding all AI use cases the Department of Homeland Security had planned for 2025. The AI Enhanced ICE Tip Processing service aims to assist ICE investigators in “quickly identifying and acting on tips” for urgent cases, as well as translating non-English submissions, according to the inventory. It also offers a “BLUF,” or a “high-level summary of the tip,” generated with the help of at least one large language model. The term BLUF, meaning “bottom line up front,” is often used in military contexts and by some Palantir staff internally.

DHS states that the software is “actively authorized” to support ICE operations, noting that the tool minimizes the “time-consuming manual effort needed to review and categorize incoming tips.” The inventory indicates that the AI-enhanced tip processing “became operational” on May 2, 2025. While the DHS inventory lacks extensive details about the large language models used by Palantir for generating the BLUFs, it does mention that ICE employs “commercially available large language models” that have been “trained on public domain data by their providers.”

“There was no additional training using agency data on top of what is available in the models’ base set of capabilities,” the inventory further explains. “During operation, the AI models interact with tip submissions.” The “2025 DHS AI Use Case Inventory,” released on Wednesday on the DHS website, has been published annually since 2022. Notably, the 2024 edition does not reference the use of AI for processing tip line submissions.

Palantir has served as a primary contractor for ICE since 2011, providing an extensive suite of analytical tools for the agency. Until recently, little was known about Palantir’s involvement in processing tips for ICE. This initiative was mentioned in connection with a $1.96 million payment made by ICE to Palantir in September 2025, which was intended to modify the Investigative Case Management System (ICM)—a version of Palantir’s standard law enforcement product, Gotham, designed to store information regarding current or past ICE investigations. This payment included reference to the “Tipline and Investigative Leads Suite,” but offered no further specifics about Palantir’s work on this “Tipline” integration.

However, the “AI Enhanced ICE Tip Processing” tool might represent an upgrade to the “FALCON Tipline,” which took over ICE’s previous tip-processing system around 2012. Palantir, ICE, and DHS have not yet responded to requests for comment. According to a DHS document last updated in 2021, the FALCON Tipline is responsible for processing tips submitted by the public or law enforcement concerning “suspected illegal activity” or “suspicious activity” to ICE’s Homeland Security Investigations (HSI) Tipline Unit. ICE appears to operate only one tip line, allowing submissions to be made either online or by phone.

An entry in a federal register from December 2025 indicates that when HSI receives a tip, investigators within its Tipline Unit perform “queries” across various “DHS, law enforcement, and immigration databases.” After assessing the results, HSI agents prepare “investigative reports” and refer tips to the relevant offices within DHS. The extent to which the new AI-enhanced processing may assist this workflow remains unclear. Data from the FALCON Tipline, Palantir’s ICM, and several other databases are collected and made searchable through the FALCON Search & Analysis System, a distinct tool also created by Palantir.