--- title: "Tech's silence on ICE is not neutral" description: "A note about a line I have had in my bio for months, and what an AI agent showed me this week." url: https://jeffkazzee.substack.com/p/techs-silence-on-ice-is-not-neutral --- # Tech's silence on ICE is not neutral > A note about a line I have had in my bio for months, and what an AI agent showed me this week. Published 2026-05-13. Originally at https://jeffkazzee.substack.com/p/techs-silence-on-ice-is-not-neutral ![](https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/$s_!cBKv!,w_1456,c_limit,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2Ff80ed5e3-f66d-4382-8402-0b25f3972f18_1672x941.png) The accounts I follow can take eight paragraphs to argue about a system prompt. About what ICE bought from Palantir this month, they have written nothing. An ICE officer types a zip code into a Palantir app called [ELITE](https://www.404media.co/elite-the-palantir-app-ice-uses-to-find-neighborhoods-to-raid/). A count of people with an “immigration nexus” appears on a map. The count, [per court testimony](https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2026/mar/13/ice-agent-court-testimony-oregon), includes naturalized citizens. Somewhere in the model that produced the count there is a confidence threshold tuned by a person who is paid to think about thresholds. That person reads model cards on release day. That person is, in some sense, ours. Here is what the accounts I follow have written nothing about. The [Washington Post](https://www.washingtonpost.com/immigration/2026/05/13/dhs-picks-detention-industry-veteran-david-venturella-lead-ice/) reported on Tuesday that [David Venturella](https://www.npr.org/2026/05/12/g-s1-121766/ice-acting-director-venturella) has been named acting director of Immigration and Customs Enforcement, effective June 1. Venturella worked at GEO Group, the private prison company, from 2012 until 2023, including as [Senior Vice President of Client Relations](https://investors.geogroup.com/static-files/15aea0e3-2f9c-41ec-9b7a-81012810d81d). Democrats on the House Judiciary Committee had already flagged a [conflict-of-interest concern](https://www.npr.org/2026/05/12/g-s1-121766/ice-acting-director-venturella) about him overseeing ICE contracts that flow to his former employer. The day before, Lever News published a [follow-up](https://www.levernews.com/the-ice-surveillance-firm-with-missing-executives-and-phantom-clients/) to its [April investigation](https://www.levernews.com/inside-ices-12-million-plan-to-map-immigrants-patterns-of-life/) of Edge Ops LLC, a vendor that won a $12 million ICE contract for “Project SAFE HAVEN,” described in the contract as a “question-based AI interface” to track immigrants and categorize them as potential threats. After Lever’s first piece, Edge Ops scrubbed its website. The follow-up documents that the company appears to have used stock-photo executives, an absent computer scientist, and a “partner” that says it never worked with them. And the same week, the ACLU published a [roundup of four named Palantir products inside ICE](https://www.aclu.org/news/privacy-technology/palantir-deportation-roundup). Not allegations — products with names, contract numbers, [sam.gov](https://sam.gov/opp/f71acee6010c423db4902446a59a690c/view) entries, and a leaked user guide obtained by [404 Media](https://www.404media.co/elite-the-palantir-app-ice-uses-to-find-neighborhoods-to-raid/). **ImmigrationOS**: a $30 million no-bid contract awarded April 2025, now over [$145 million on USAspending.gov](https://www.usaspending.gov/award/CONT_AWD_70CTD022FR0000170_7012_GS35F0086U_4730), running through September 2027. **ELITE** (Enhanced Leads Identification and Targeting for Enforcement): a targeting app ICE uses to map “target rich” neighborhoods, pulling data from HHS, USCIS, and a commercial data broker. **ICM** (Investigative Case Management): ICE’s case backbone since 2014, sole-sourced, and the [DHS Privacy Impact Assessment](https://www.dhs.gov/publication/dhs-ice-pia-045-ice-investigative-case-management) confirms US citizens are included in the consolidated profiles. And an [AI tip-processing tool](https://www.dhs.gov/ai/use-case-inventory/ice) the DHS AI Use Case Inventory describes in less specific terms than the contract documents do. In a separate agreement, ICE and CMS now share personal data on roughly [80 million Medicaid patients](https://apnews.com/article/ab9c2267ce596089410387bfcb40eeb7). This is the documented, public stack. The contracts are on [USAspending.gov](https://www.usaspending.gov/award/CONT_AWD_70CTD022FR0000170_7012_GS35F0086U_4730). The PIAs are on [dhs.gov](https://www.dhs.gov/publication/dhs-ice-pia-045-ice-investigative-case-management). The user guide is in a [404 Media story](https://www.404media.co/elite-the-palantir-app-ice-uses-to-find-neighborhoods-to-raid/). The GAO published a report in December 2024 — [GAO-25-107435](https://files.gao.gov/reports/GAO-25-107435/index.html) — finding that of seventeen DHS sector AI risk assessments analyzed, *none* fully addressed the six activities required for effective risk assessment. Zero of seventeen. That finding is still standing. I am not breaking any of this. Just Futures Law and Mijente have a long-running report called *[Automating Deportation](https://mijente.net/wp-content/uploads/2024/06/Automating-Deportation.pdf)*. EPIC has been in [FOIA litigation against ICE and Palantir](https://epic.org/documents/epic-v-ice-palantir-databases/) since 2017. [ACLU](https://www.aclu.org/news/privacy-technology/palantir-deportation-roundup), [404 Media](https://www.404media.co/elite-the-palantir-app-ice-uses-to-find-neighborhoods-to-raid/), [The Intercept](https://theintercept.com/2017/03/02/palantir-provides-the-engine-for-donald-trumps-deportation-machine/), [The Guardian](https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/ng-interactive/2025/sep/22/ice-palantir-data), [WIRED](https://www.wired.com/story/ice-palantir-immigrationos/), [Fortune](https://fortune.com/2026/01/26/ice-allegedly-uses-palantir-tool-tracking-medicaid-data/), and [Lever News](https://www.levernews.com/inside-ices-12-million-plan-to-map-immigrants-patterns-of-life/) have each documented pieces of this stack across multiple years. The information is not hidden. It is just unread by most of the people I would expect to read it. I have not posted about any of this either. The line *tech’s silence on ICE is not neutral* has been in my bio since I put it there months ago. The news that finally moved me to write came in a morning brief generated by an AI agent I built to find stories I would otherwise miss. The agent saw what I missed. I want to take that seriously rather than glide past it. What it means, I think, is that the line was easier to write than to live. I had the conviction; the attention was the harder part. The platforms I read for AI news have organized themselves around things that are not this. After a workday of code and releases, the attention I have left is the attention those platforms shaped. Calling this cowardice misses what is actually happening. It is an attention economy doing what attention economies do, inside a community that calls that doing intelligence. In the 2010s the same community I am writing to now made a critique of the Google and Facebook engineers who built systems whose downstream harms they did not have to see. The complaint then was that the architecture of not-looking was itself the harm. I think about that complaint less than I should, because the version of it I would have to make today implicates me. I am also not going to say Palantir is purely doing harm, or that the government can be trusted on any of this. I have not read every line of Palantir’s code and I am not going to pretend I have. The contracts on [USAspending.gov](https://www.usaspending.gov/award/CONT_AWD_70CTD022FR0000170_7012_GS35F0086U_4730) persist across administrations. The [OIG](https://www.oig.dhs.gov/sites/default/files/assets/2025-02/OIG-25-10-Jan25.pdf) and [GAO](https://files.gao.gov/reports/GAO-25-107435/index.html) write reports that go unread regardless of who is in the White House. Both things can be true. I don’t want a post from you. I want a few minutes of the same attention you give a model card on release day. Open the ELITE [user guide](https://www.404media.co/elite-the-palantir-app-ice-uses-to-find-neighborhoods-to-raid/), the ICM [Privacy Impact Assessment](https://www.dhs.gov/publication/dhs-ice-pia-045-ice-investigative-case-management), the ImmigrationOS [statement of work](https://iptp-production.s3.amazonaws.com/media/documents/2025.04.17_ICE_Limited_Sources_Justification_for_70CTD022FR0000170.pdf). These are AI systems whose outputs end in arrests. The line has been in my bio for months. It was easier to write than to live. Today I am trying to live it. --- **If this was useful, subscribe. I write here once a week, deep and slow, mostly about where AI is actually pointing and what it looks like from the inside. For lighter stuff — Codex tricks, Zo Computer walkthroughs, AI for people who feel locked out — find me at [Zo Computer Toolshed on Facebook](https://www.facebook.com/profile.php?id=61588689719800), or at [jeffkazzee.zo.space](https://jeffkazzee.zo.space/).** **P.S. If you want to try Zo Computer — the cloud workspace where most of my AI experiments live — [here’s my referral link](https://zo-computer.cello.so/X9jcdFXqh9Z).**