United States Immigration and Customs Enforcement is leveraging Palantir’s generative artificial intelligence tools to sort and summarize immigration enforcement tips from its public submission form, according to an inventory released Wednesday of all use cases the Department of Homeland Security had for AI in 2025.
The “AI Enhanced ICE Tip Processing” service is intended to help ICE investigators “to more quickly identify and action tips” for urgent cases, as well as translate submissions not made in English, according to the inventory. It also provides a “BLUF,” defined as a “high-level summary of the tip,” produced using at least one large language model. BLUF, or “bottom line up front,” is a military term that’s also used internally by some Palantir employees.
DHS says that the software is “being actively authorized” in support of ICE operations, adding that the tool helps reduce the ”time-consuming manual effort required to review and categorize incoming tips.” The date when the AI-enhanced tip processing “became operational” is listed in the inventory as May 2, 2025.
The DHS inventory does not provide many details about the large language models Palantir uses to generate the BLUFs; however, it does note that ICE uses “commercially available large language models” that were “trained on the public domain data by their providers.”
“There was no additional training using agency data on top of what is available in the models’ base set of capabilities,” the inventory also notes. “During operation, the AI models interact with tip submissions.”
The “2025 DHS AI Use Case Inventory,” published Wednesday on DHS’s website, has been published for every year since 2022. The 2024 version of the inventory does not mention using AI to process tipline submissions.
Palantir has been a major ICE contractor since 2011, and it provides a sweeping set of analytical tools for the agency. However, until now, almost nothing has been known about Palantir’s work processing tips for ICE.
This work was mentioned once in the description of a $1.96 million Palantir payment ICE made in September 2025. The payment was to modify the Investigative Case Management System (ICM)—a version of Palantir’s off-the-shelf law enforcement product, Gotham, which stores information about current or former ICE investigations—to include the “Tipline and Investigative Leads Suite.”
The description includes no other details about Palantir’s work on this “Tipline” integration.
However, the “AI Enhanced ICE Tip Processing” tool may be an update to the “FALCON Tipline,” which replaced ICE’s previous tip-processing system around 2012.
Palantir, ICE, and DHS did not immediately respond to requests for comment.
According to a DHS document last updated in 2021, the FALCON Tipline processes tips submitted by the public or law enforcement agencies about “suspected illegal activity” or “suspicious activity” to ICE’s Homeland Security Investigations (HSI) Tipline Unit. ICE only appears to have one tipline, but submissions can be made online or over the phone.
An entry to a federal register in December 2025 notes that when HSI receives a tip, investigators within its Tipline Unit conduct “queries” across various “DHS, law enforcement, and immigration databases.” After analyzing these results, HSI agents write “investigative reports” and then refer tips to the appropriate offices within DHS. It’s unclear exactly how much of this workflow may be assisted by the newly AI-enhanced processing.
Data from the FALCON Tipline, Palantir’s ICM, and several other databases are ingested and made searchable by the FALCON Search & Analysis System, a separate but similarly named tool also developed by Palantir.
After federal agents shot and killed Minneapolis nurse Alex Pretti on Saturday, Palantir workers pressed leadership for answers on the company’s work with ICE. In Slack messages, reviewed by WIRED this week, workers asked whether Palantir could “put any pressure on ICE at all.” One worker wrote, “Our involvement with ice has been internally swept under the rug under Trump2 too much. We need an understanding of our involvement here.”
