ICE Officers Confirm Under Oath That Palantir's ELITE App Identified Arrest Targets While Daily Quotas Drove Oregon Raids

For the first time in a US courtroom, Immigration and Customs Enforcement officers confirmed under sworn oath that they used a Palantir-built targeting application called ELITE to identify arrest locations. Officers were ordered to make eight arrests per team each day during operations that a federal judge subsequently ruled were 'violent and brutal' and violated the US Constitution.

The testimony, delivered during a December 2025 hearing in the federal class-action suit M-J-M-A v. Wamsley, was first reported in full by The Guardian on March 13, 2026 and marks the most detailed on-record account yet of how quota-driven enforcement and AI-assisted surveillance are operating together at the street level of America's mass deportation campaign.

The case was brought by Innovation Law Lab, a Portland-based immigrants' rights nonprofit, after ICE detained two people, including a farmworker identified only by her initials, M-J-M-A, and a grandfather named Victor Cruz Gamez who had a valid work permit, without judicial warrants during autumn 2025 sweeps in Oregon.

Eight Arrests a Day

In the December hearing, an ICE agent identified in court documents only as 'JB' told the court his team received a verbal instruction to make eight arrests per day. His team consisted of between nine and twelve officers and formed part of a broader DHS operation, officially called Operation Black Rose, which launched in Portland in autumn 2025 and, by mid-December, had recorded more than 1,200 arrests in the greater Portland area, according to DHS figures.

When Innovation Law Lab's attorney asked JB whether he complied with the 'quota,' the US government's own lawyer objected to the use of that word. The judge overruled the objection. JB confirmed he had met the target.

The eight-per-team figure, extrapolated across Oregon's full deployment, suggested a potential daily total of roughly 50 arrests across the state, according to Innovation Law Lab's own estimate.

That number sits within the national arithmetic described publicly by Trump administration adviser Stephen Miller, who repeatedly cited a goal of 3,000 arrests per day nationwide. DHS officials have consistently denied that formal arrest quotas exist. JB's sworn testimony appeared to directly contradict those denials.

The hearing illuminated the on-the-ground mechanics of how those numbers were pursued. On Oct. 30, 2025, ICE officers parked three unmarked vehicles outside an apartment complex in Woodburn, a predominantly agricultural community south of Portland, heavily populated by farmworkers and their families, after ELITE flagged the neighbourhood.

When M-J-M-A arrived in a van on her way to work, officers smashed the vehicle's window, pulled her out, and used a separate biometric app called Mobile Fortify to scan her face. The facial recognition returned two different names. Agents detained her and approximately 35 other people that day. The judge noted that ICE officers arrested 'an extraordinary number of Oregonians in October 2025 with little regard for conducting lawful arrests.'

Inside ELITE

ELITE is an acronym for Enhanced Leads Identification and Targeting for Enforcement. Its existence and Palantir's role in developing it were first detailed by 404 Media in January 2026, based on internal ICE documents and the Oregon court testimony. A user guide obtained by 404 Media and later made public describes the tool as 'a targeting tool designed to improve capabilities for identifying and prioritising high-value targets through advanced analytics.'

Palantir holds a £23.5 million ($29.9 million) government contract to develop and maintain ELITE, which started in September 2025 and runs through at least 2026. That contract builds on a separate £23.6 million ($30 million) ImmigrationOS contract signed in July 2025, meaning Palantir has received more than £47 million ($60 million) from ICE in under a year.

In practice, ELITE renders a map interface, described by 404 Media as operating 'kind of like Google Maps,' that displays the density of people with what the system calls an 'immigration nexus' across a given area.

When an officer selects an individual, the app produces a dossier containing a photograph, alien registration number, date of birth and last known address, together with an Address Confidence Score between 0 and 100 that indicates how reliable the address information is thought to be.

The address data feeding those confidence scores comes from a variety of government and commercial sources. It includes health and benefits information. Last year, ICE and the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services signed a data-sharing agreement granting ICE access to the personal records of approximately 80 million Medicaid patients, individuals enrolled in a public health programme with no expectation that their address information would be used for immigration enforcement.

The Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) described the arrangement as turning 'a sensitive health programme into a de facto dragnet.' A federal judge has not yet ruled on the EFF's bid to block the Medicaid data feed.

Palantir pushed back against characterisations of its role in a formal statement published in January 2026. The company said it acts solely as 'a data processor' and does not 'play an active role in any of its customers' data collection efforts or what clients do with that information.' It also stated that 'all of Palantir's government contracts and the corresponding deployments of software instances are unique to the contracting agency, with legal, procedural and technical guardrails in place to protect each agency's data.'

Judge Kasubhai's Ruling, Plaintiffs' Testimonies and Court Findings

Judge Kasubhai ruled on Feb. 5, 2026 that the pattern of warrantless arrests described in the case violated the Fourth and Fifth Amendments of the US Constitution. The injunction, which mirrors earlier rulings in Colorado and the District of Columbia, requires ICE in Oregon to obtain an administrative warrant signed by a supervisor before detaining anyone for a civil immigration violation, unless officers can document an individualised finding that the person is a flight risk.

The government was also ordered to provide periodic compliance reports to Innovation Law Lab's legal team.

Stephen Manning, executive director of Innovation Law Lab, said outside the courthouse, 'Today, the judge ruled that ICE can't just grab people and figure out the justification later.' He described the quota evidence as illustrative of an enforcement culture in which 'the law is an impediment to the quotas.'

Nelly Garcia Orjuela, a staff attorney with the organisation, said the ELITE testimony had revealed 'another level of surveillance and how much information [ICE] has at their fingertips,' and that agents were using it to 'target communities that are the most vulnerable,' rather than individuals with serious criminal records, as DHS claims is its operational priority.