ICE Agents Drew Shapes on a Map to Select Minneapolis Targets. Here’s What the Software Shows.

The system sees 23 government databases. Stephen Miller profits from the company that built it.

Jan 23, 2026

This is a follow up to my existing coverage on the radicalization of immigration enforcement. Please consider supporting me with a like, a restack, or a subscription.

The Shape on the Screen

In December 2025, an ICE Fugitive Operations agent identified only as “JB” testified under oath in federal court in Oregon. He described how targeting works.

You open ELITE—Enhanced Leads Identification & Targeting for Enforcement, the operational interface for Palantir’s surveillance platform. You see a map. Pins appear: addresses, confidence scores, likelihood estimates. You draw a shape around an area. The system shows you everyone inside it.

“You’re going to go to a more dense population rather than... if there’s one pin at a house and the likelihood of them actually living there is like 10 percent... you’re not going to go there.”

You go to the target-rich areas.

Agent JB testified that his team had an unwritten quota: eight arrests per day. When they ran out of assigned targets, “We had to develop our own.” The judge presiding over the case, U.S. District Judge Mustafa Kasubhai, observed: “We’re dealing with a system that may very well have violated the law.”

This is how 2,000 federal agents knew where to go when Operation Metro Surge launched in Minneapolis on December 1, 2025. This is how ICE flooded a metropolitan area with the “largest immigration operation ever.” This is the software behind the pins on the map.

The system built to find undocumented immigrants can find anyone.

On September 25, 2025, NSPM-7 provided the justification to look.

What the System Sees

Immigration OS doesn’t collect new data. It fuses what already exists—government databases and commercial surveillance networks—into what Georgetown Law’s Center on Privacy & Technology calls “detailed dossiers on nearly anyone, seemingly at any time.”

selective focus photography of lens — Photo by Bernard Hermant on Unsplash

Twenty-three confirmed data sources feed the system. Each one closes an exit.

Your taxes. An April 7, 2025 memorandum of understanding grants ICE access to IRS taxpayer addresses—over one million records requested in the first months alone. The legal justification: a provision designed for criminal tax investigations, repurposed for immigration enforcement.

Your benefits. Social Security Administration records provide addresses and banking information—up to 50,000 records monthly. Medicaid files feed directly into ELITE. Disability records. The safety net becomes the surveillance net.

Your utilities. Thomson Reuters’ CLEAR platform links over 400 million utility records across all 50 states. Electric bills. Water bills. The database knows where you keep the lights on.

Your car. A $6.1 million contract with Vigilant Solutions provides access to license plate reader networks: 5 billion data points across 50 metropolitan areas. The cameras mounted on police cars, toll booths, parking garages—they feed a database that tracks where your vehicle has been for years.

Your phone. Babel Street’s Locate X provides cell phone location data—$2.5 million in contracts since 2018. No warrant required. ICE purchases what it cannot subpoena.

Your face. Clearview AI’s database contains 50 billion images scraped from the internet. A $9.2 million contract, signed September 2025, gives ICE access—explicitly including investigation of “assaults against law enforcement officers.”

Your posts. Zignal Labs ingests 8 billion social media posts daily. ICE is seeking 30 contractors for 24/7 monitoring including “sentiment analysis” of criticism. NSPM-7 designates “anti-Americanism” and opposition to “law enforcement and border control” as terrorism indicators. The system monitoring 8 billion posts now has authorization to flag criticism as a threat.

Your history. TECS border crossing records extend back to 1987. SEVIS tracks every individual on a student visa. Passport application records. The Enforcement Integrated Database stores biometrics. FBI’s Terrorist Screening Database. NCIC criminal records. If you’ve been flagged anywhere, Immigration OS knows.

The Policy Framework

The infrastructure was built for immigration enforcement. Three documents repurpose it for political surveillance.

NSPM-7 — National Security Presidential Memorandum 7, signed September 25, 2025, designates ideological markers as domestic terrorism indicators: anti-Americanism, anti-capitalism, anti-Christianity, “extremism on migration, race, and gender,” hostility toward “traditional American views on family, religion, and morality.”

It directs “exhaustive investigation” of all participants in these “terroristic conspiracies—including the organized structures, networks, entities, organizations, funding sources, and predicate actions behind them.”

Journalist Ken Klippenstein: “NSPM-7 is a declaration of war on anyone who does not support the Trump administration and its agenda.”

Larry Pfeiffer, former CIA Chief of Staff, called it “one of the most dangerous documents to come out of the White House since the orders to intern Japanese citizens during WWII.”

The Bondi Memo — On December 4, 2025, Attorney General Pam Bondi directed the FBI to compile a list of domestic terrorism organizations. The DOJ confirmed its authenticity.

Targets include: “opposition to law and immigration enforcement,” “extreme views in favor of mass migration,” “adherence to radical gender ideology.”

The enforcement mechanisms: a cash reward system for informants. Retroactive investigations going back five years. Treasury Department audits of nonprofits. IRS investigations and potential asset freezes.

The FBI’s terrorist watchlist currently contains 1.1 million records, approximately 6,000 of them U.S. persons. The watchlist is expected to double.

The 2026 Threat Assessment — A leaked DHS Homeland Threat Assessment obtained by Klippenstein adds another category: “class-based or economic grievances.”

Economic protest is now a threat vector.

Today, thousands of Minnesotans are participating in a general strike—constitutionally protected economic protest. The 2026 Threat Assessment categorizes “class-based or economic grievances” as a threat vector.

The system is watching. The policy says what they’re doing might be terrorism.

This Isn’t Theoretical

On January 22, 2026, the DOJ arrested Jena Armstrong—an ordained minister—for disrupting a church service to protest the ICE director who preaches there. The charge framework: investigating “attacks on Christianity.”

Armstrong is not alone. Immigration OS has explicit capabilities for exactly the targeting NSPM-7 authorizes.

Track donations? IRS data flows into the system. Before Senator Wyden exposed it, HSI used just 8 administrative subpoenas to obtain 6.2 million financial records from Western Union and Maxitransfers—six months of transfers over $500 to and from the border states.

Identify protest attendance? Geofenced cell phone location data. Social media monitoring for event check-ins.

Map organizational membership? SocialNet’s network analysis. FALCON’s link visualization.

Acting ICE Director Todd Lyons stated the intent plainly: “We are going to track the money. We are going to track these ringleaders.”

The architecture is complete.

The Money

Stephen Miller—the architect of family separation, the man who screamed “quantity over quality” at ICE directors, the deputy chief of staff who sets deportation quotas—holds a financial stake in Palantir.

His financial disclosure reveals $100,001 to $250,000 in Palantir stock.

Palantir has received over $248 million in documented ICE contracts since 2011, according to USAspending.gov. With the 2025 ImmigrationOS contracts—$30 million in April, $29.9 million in September—the cumulative total now exceeds $300 million.

Miller sets the quotas. Palantir builds the targeting system. Miller profits from both.

Senator Ron Wyden’s June 2025 letter to Palantir CEO Alex Karp warned the emerging system would “make it significantly easier for Donald Trump’s Administration to spy on and target his growing list of enemies.” The letter drew a historical parallel: “IBM has historically provided technology to facilitate some of the most shameful human rights abuses in modern history, including selling computers to apartheid-era South Africa and Nazi Germany.”

Palantir’s response was expansion. Government revenue grew 52% year-over-year.

Minneapolis

On December 1, 2025, Operation Metro Surge activated. Over 2,000 ICE and CBP agents flooded Minneapolis-St. Paul. DHS called it “the largest immigration operation ever.”

Independent analysis found approximately 5% of those arrested had records of violent crimes.

On January 7, 2026, ICE Agent Jonathan Ross shot Renee Nicole Good through her windshield. Her last words: “That’s fine, dude. I’m not mad at you.” Three shots in 698 milliseconds.

The Tincher v. Noem lawsuit, filed December 17, 2025 by the ACLU of Minnesota, documents what the infrastructure produced. The stories are not abstractions.

Susan Tincher, 55. On December 9, she stood on a sidewalk six feet from ICE agents, filming. Officers pulled her to the ground, handcuffed her face-down in the snow. At the Whipple Federal Building, agents shackled her legs, cut off her wedding ring, cut off her bra, cut her boot laces. She was held for over five hours. A film crew coordinating with ICE filmed her arrest for propaganda purposes. She was released without charges.

John Biestman, 69, and Janet Lee, 67. On December 7, this married couple drove to observe ICE vehicles circling a church during services. When they turned into a parking lot, ICE cars boxed them in. Masked officers surrounded their vehicle and pointed semiautomatic weapons at them. Before releasing them, an agent stated: “We have your license plate. We know where to find you.”

Mubashir Khalif Hussen, 20. A U.S. citizen whose family arrived as Somali refugees when he was six. On December 10, he was walking to lunch when masked ICE agents stopped him. He repeatedly stated “I’m a citizen.” Agents refused to look at his ID, tackled him, forced him into a chokehold, and put him on his knees in the snow. At the detention facility, he was told he was being deported—despite being a citizen. He was released only after showing a photo of his passport.

Patty O’Keefe and Brandon Siguenza. On January 11, these U.S. citizens were observing ICE activity when agents sprayed pepper spray into their car’s intake vent, smashed both front windows, and arrested them. During eight hours of detention, agents mocked O’Keefe’s appearance and referenced Renee Good’s killing. An agent told O’Keefe: “You guys got to stop obstructing us. That’s why that lesbian bitch is dead.” Siguenza reported agents offered him money or legal protection for undocumented relatives if he provided names of immigrants or protest organizers. Both were released without charges.

The surveillance confirmed. In late December, ICE agents threatened a pair of observers with arrest, then drove to the home of one of them and photographed it.

On January 16, 2026, Judge Katherine Menendez issued a preliminary injunction. ICE cannot “retaliate against peaceful protesters” or “arrest/detain people engaging in peaceful protest.” The court noted that “safely following Covered Federal Agents at an appropriate distance does not, by itself, create reasonable suspicion to justify a vehicle stop.”

The injunction was a bandage.

On January 21, the 8th Circuit Court of Appeals granted the Justice Department’s request for an administrative stay. The restrictions on pepper spray, the limits on stops—lifted, pending appeal.

Today, as thousands strike, the infrastructure operates without restraint.

Update: “We Have a Nice Little Database”

Added January 24, 2026

Hours after this piece published, video emerged from Maine of an ICE agent photographing a legal observer’s car. When she asked why, he replied:

“Because we have a nice little database, and now you’re considered a domestic terrorist.”

Ken Klippenstein reported that DHS has ordered officers to gather identifying information about anyone filming them.

The infrastructure documented above isn’t theoretical. It’s operational. And agents are telling Americans to their faces that exercising First Amendment rights puts them in a domestic terrorist database.

The Question

Immigration OS fuses data on the vast majority of Americans: driver’s license records covering three-quarters of adults, utility records on 400 million customers, real-time location tracking in cities housing three-quarters of the population.

NSPM-7 designates political dissent as a domestic terrorism indicator.

The Bondi memo directs the FBI to compile lists and recruit informants.

The 2026 threat assessment adds economic grievance to the target categories.

ELITE displays targets on a map with confidence scores.

Agents draw shapes to select who gets swept up.

The question is no longer whether the technical capability for ideological targeting exists. Sworn testimony, leaked documents, and court filings confirm it does.

The question is how many Americans will be targeted before oversight catches up to capability.

In Minneapolis, legal observers were followed home. A 69-year-old had guns pointed at him for watching from a parking lot. A U.S. citizen was told he was being deported. A woman was shot dead and called a “lesbian bitch” by the agents who came after.

The software worked exactly as designed.

Mark Ramm is an investigative journalist and publisher of The RAMM on Substack.

Sources

ELITE and Immigration OS

404 Media: “’ELITE’: The Palantir App ICE Uses to Find Neighborhoods to Raid” — January 2026
M-J-M-A- v. Wamsley, Case No. 6:25-cv-02011-MTK (D. Or.) — December 2025 evidentiary hearing testimony
Georgetown Law Center on Privacy & Technology: “American Dragnet”
Electronic Frontier Foundation: “Immigration OS”

Data Sources Documentation

ProPublica: “The IRS Is Building a Vast System to Share Millions of Taxpayers’ Data With ICE”
Asian Law Caucus: SSA-ICE data sharing documentation
ACLU of Northern California: License plate reader documentation
Biometric Update: Clearview AI contract reporting