Newly unsealed court filings allege that US Department of Homeland Security agents compiled dossiers on people who were simply monitoring Immigration and Customs Enforcement activity in Maine, then stored that information inside a Palantir-built database. According to the filing, those observers were treated as potential threats and had their photos, license plate numbers, and other personal details added to a system known as Investigative Case Management, or ICM, which ICE uses to document investigations.

As detailed in the reporting from Wired, a Homeland Security Investigations agent identified in the documents only as “Agent J.C.” filmed people watching an ICE operation in a Home Depot parking lot and entered them into ICM under labels such as “Threat to Law Enforcement, Professional Protestor.” The filings say the agent sent images of these observers to a US Customs and Border Protection officer, who then ran facial recognition searches using a mobile app called Mobile Query, effectively turning casual documentation of ICE activity into a trigger for biometric scans across federal systems.

The ICM platform is one piece of a broader surveillance and data-integration stack Palantir has built for DHS and ICE, designed to link together disparate records about individuals and let agents spot patterns across multiple databases. In a separate Freedom of Information Act lawsuit, civil-rights group Just Futures Law describes Palantir tools such as the ELITE app, the ImmigrationOS platform, and ICM itself as key components of ICE’s targeting machinery, used to surface addresses and connections for people with removal orders or criminal records. The Electronic Frontier Foundation has likewise reported that ICE employs Palantir’s ELITE system for “prioritized enforcement,” meaning agents can quickly generate leads by cross-referencing government and commercial data sources.

Concerns about Palantir’s role in government surveillance have already sparked a wave of legal battles and public protests, including FOIA suits by watchdog American Oversight seeking records on how agencies like DHS, ICE, CDC, IRS, and the Social Security Administration share sensitive personal data with the company. Following a March 20, 2025 executive order promoting aggressive data-sharing across federal agencies, American Oversight warns that Palantir’s contracts—worth hundreds of millions of dollars—risk creating a vast, opaque surveillance apparatus that can track immigrants and citizens alike. Those fears have helped fuel actions such as a nurses’ march targeting Palantir’s ICE-related contracts, where demonstrators condemned the use of health and social-service data in immigration enforcement.

The latest filings about Maine protest observers land amid revelations that ICE’s data pipeline now extends well beyond immigration records into healthcare and social services, thanks in part to Palantir-engineered tools. Fortune has reported that ICE and the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services signed a data-sharing agreement granting ICE access to personal information on tens of millions of Medicaid recipients, documents that surfaced after a lawsuit by 404 Media and the Freedom of the Press Foundation against DHS. A separate case described by law firm Keker, Van Nest & Peters alleges that ICE unlawfully shared confidential Medicaid data with Palantir through a Microsoft Teams chat, leaving that information stored in multiple cloud locations and deepening worries about how far enforcement data can spread.

Civil-liberties groups argue that labeling peaceful observers as “threats,” feeding their images into a Palantir system, and running facial recognition checks on them crosses a line from immigration enforcement into retaliation against dissent. The EFF and allied organizations have already sued over Palantir’s work on HHS Protect, a massive pandemic-era data platform built for the Department of Health and Human Services, warning that health information can be quietly repurposed for deportation campaigns when paired with DHS tools. For geeks used to seeing “Palantir” as the all-seeing orb from Tolkien, the idea of a real-world Palantir quietly indexing protester faces across federal databases feels uncomfortably close to dystopian sci-fi.

Palantir, for its part, has repeatedly pushed back on the idea that it acts as a surveillance agency, insisting that it merely provides software while government clients control what data goes into the system. A company spokesperson has called protesters’ claims “baseless,” arguing that Palantir does not itself collect or store data or decide immigration policy, even as watchdogs point out that its tools are embedded in nearly every stage of ICE’s enforcement chain. With FOIA lawsuits ongoing and new court filings surfacing, the Maine case is likely to become another flashpoint in the fight over how far government tech contractors can go in weaponizing data against people who dare to watch, document, or challenge US immigration enforcement.