ICE tested Palantir ELITE to flag possible noncitizen voters

The documents show ICE staff planning to put voter data into ELITE, though they don’t prove it happened. ELITE stands for Enhanced Leads Identification & Targeting for Enforcement. When it was first reported in January, it was described as letting agents build maps of potential deportation targets, open files on each person and see a “confidence score” for their current address.

In a May 26 email, a worker in Homeland Security Investigations (HSI), one of ICE’s two main branches, wrote that its Innovation Lab, known internally as iLab, was processing Justice Department voter rolls and data from US Citizenship and Immigration Services. The worker said criminal histories weren’t included yet but that work was underway to add them, and that coordination with iLab continued on getting the processed voter roll data into ELITE for tracking leads and investigations.

A July 7 weekly report on “election integrity investigations” went further. It listed six states, Michigan, Georgia, New Mexico, Connecticut, Missouri and Kentucky, whose data iLab had enriched and which were waiting for Palantir to enter it into ELITE. Another email in the same chain said the update would be sent to the White House.

Palantir denies the data went in. “Voter roll data has never been integrated into ELITE,” a company spokesman said. A separate source told another outlet the same thing, and the records themselves don’t show a completed transfer.

Not everyone is so sure. A DHS official, speaking on background, said they couldn’t say for certain the data didn’t reach the system, citing heavy secrecy. ICE said it does not disclose its investigative methods, while DHS said HSI is actively investigating election fraud wherever it finds it. The White House didn’t address ELITE.

Chinmayi Sharma, an associate professor at Fordham Law School who has followed ELITE closely, reads the language as a system being built for the long term rather than one already live. Her argument is that DHS brings ready-made authorities, data, vendor contracts and infrastructure, which makes it an efficient home for voter investigations even though elections aren’t normally its job.

The numbers are large. By late May, HSI said it had taken in about 50.6 million voter records from the Justice Department, and ten priority states on its list: Arizona, California, Florida, Georgia, Michigan, Minnesota, New Jersey, Ohio, Pennsylvania and Texas. A further 48.4 million records arrived from what the documents call independent sources, linked to DHS Deputy Assistant Secretary Heather Honey, who has cast doubt on the 2020 election results.

A second stream came from immigration records. By June 1, HSI had picked out tens of thousands of USCIS-derived records for screening, processed 2,290 of them and sent 1,586 investigative leads to 24 field offices.

The records say little about how identities were matched, what accuracy standards applied, or how investigators told an outdated or duplicate entry apart from actual wrongdoing. That’s the core worry for privacy advocates: voter rolls are full of old addresses and similar names, and a false match in an enforcement system can follow a person.

For all that data, ICE’s own reports describe few findings. HSI said it generated more than 2,000 leads across 49 field offices in 2025, with 68 cases presented for prosecution. By May 25, 2026, it had opened 418 voter fraud cases, 318 of which hadn’t been referred for prosecution. The records give no overall conviction figures.

Investigators also looked hard at nonprofits that help people register to vote. Counts differ between reports, with one tally at more than 120 groups and another above 150. In Pennsylvania, 82 were reviewed and two flagged for a closer look. In New Jersey, a review of more than 40 groups found “no derogatory information.” The documents also show HSI considered sending undercover agents into voter registration groups.

The wider evidence points the same way. The available evidence shows noncitizen voting is extremely rare. The Justice Department recently announced charges in 16 cases involving foreign nationals and voting-related crimes, and all 16 people were lawful permanent residents.

Voters don’t need to do anything differently to cast a ballot. If you’re a citizen and eligible, you can register and vote as usual, and you can check your registration with your state or local election office before the deadline.

The bigger question is about how government data gets reused. Voter rolls were built to run elections, not to feed immigration enforcement tools. Democracy Forward, the legal advocacy group that obtained the 166-page file through a Freedom of Information Act lawsuit, argues the records show an effort to discourage eligible voters. Expect more records requests, and possibly lawsuits, as the midterms approach.