ICE and Palantir: US agents using health data to hunt illegal immigrants

Government use of health data for immigration enforcement

• Commenters highlight that ICE is obtaining addresses from HHS/CMS (Medicare/Medicaid–related data) and feeding them into a Palantir tool to generate “confidence scores” for likely current addresses of targets.
• Some stress this is not hypothetical abuse: it’s direct repurposing of health‑collected data for enforcement, potentially chilling access to care.

State vs private surveillance

• One camp argues private surveillance is more dangerous: stronger incentives, fewer legal constraints, and a pathway for governments to “launder” illegal activities through corporate data.
• Others respond that governments hold unique coercive power (prison, force), so state misuse is ultimately more terrifying, with private data brokers acting as enablers.
• There’s pushback that the thread is drifting into generic “dragnet surveillance,” which some see as orthogonal to this specific HHS→ICE abuse.

Palantir’s role and effectiveness

• Skepticism that Palantir is doing anything technically impressive; several liken it to glorified VLOOKUP wrapped in an expensive interface and consulting pitch.
• Others note Palantir’s business model is precisely to break data silos for security agencies, and that “effectiveness” here mostly means efficiently enabling raids, not minimizing false positives or respecting rights.

Legal and constitutional questions

• Debate over whether this violates the Immigration and Nationality Act, Privacy Act, or HIPAA:
  • One side: law allows sharing only “identity and location of aliens,” so bulk sharing of all Medicaid beneficiaries’ data (including citizens) would be illegal.
  • Counter: HHS claims the INA compels broad sharing and it’s unclear if HIPAA constrains this kind of intra‑government use.
• Many argue that, regardless of technical legality, it reflects a broader collapse of “rule of law” for the federal executive and its allies.

Immigration policy, cruelty, and politics

• Several say if the goal were genuinely to reduce unauthorized immigration, employer crackdowns would be more effective than militarized home raids; current tactics look more like “demonstrations of strength through cruelty.”
• Data cited showing a growing share of ICE arrests are people without criminal convictions reinforces the view that this is about political theater, not public safety.
• Some note both major parties have facilitated mass deportations and surveillance; the difference now is the brazenness and use as a political weapon.

Societal response and tech responsibility

• Multiple commenters connect this to long‑standing warnings (Snowden, Cambridge Analytica, RMS, “panopticon” concerns) and lament public apathy in exchange for convenience and comfort.
• Others urge engineers to practice strict data minimization and avoid embedding third‑party trackers/analytics that could later be weaponized in similar ways.

Moral boundaries

• Strong claims that working for Palantir is morally indefensible; a few counter that moral purity is hard in a world where many corporations are complicit in harm, though others insist Palantir crosses a distinct line by purpose‑building tools to enable physical targeting and detention.