Palantir uses medical records to target people for ICE in the US – will the UK be next?

As the world watches the deadly US Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) raids in horror, Palantir is cashing in. Masked agents are using the firm’s app, Enhanced Leads Identification & Targeting for Enforcement (ELITE), to pinpoint people for deportation, and they’re using addresses from medical records to do it.

According to a user guide obtained by 404 Media, the app uses address information from the Department of Health and Human Services, US Citizenship and Immigration Services and other sources to “improve capabilities for identifying and prioritizing high-value targets through advanced analytics”. The app “brings up a dossier on each person” and “provides a confidence score on the person’s current address”. As one ICE officer revealed in court, ELITE “tells you how many people are living in this area and what’s the likelihood of them actually being there”.

This isn’t the first time we’ve seen Palantir use dystopian predictive technology. In February last year, the firm won contracts to develop a surveillance network in the UK, flagging people “about to commit a criminal offence”. But predictive models depend on past data, which risks entrenching existing bias.

The spy firm bagged a £240m contract with the Ministry of Defence earlier this month, supplying data analytics to support “critical strategic, tactical and live operational decision making”.

While the UK gets further enmeshed with the Silicon Valley giant, the Swiss government has rejected Palantir. An internal Swiss army report raised concerns that US government and intelligence services could access sensitive data. As the Labour MP Clive Lewis told the Guardian, “the Swiss army is right to be suspicious”.

“Palantir … is an organisation that the British government, in terms of the NHS, in terms of contracts, should stay very far away from,” Lewis said.

But Palantir’s questionable ethics were clear from the start. And in February 2025, Palantir’s CEO, Alex Karp said “I love the idea of getting a drone and having light fentanyl-laced urine spraying on analysts that tried to screw us.”

Palantir’s infiltration into the British government is chilling. A world where our health records are used to power state-sponsored surveillance and target vulnerable communities isn’t so far away. With NHS England currently rolling out software to run our health records from Palantir,  and Nigel Farage riding high in the polls, this terrifying possibility risks becoming an inevitability.

It’s time to push back to ensure this spy tech giant can never turn our private medical histories into tools.

Palantir did not respond to a request for comment.

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