They Know Where You Live, Where You Go, and Who Your Friends Are

I first wrote about ICE last May, when they visited Massachusetts but had yet to flood major cities with agents in combat gear. My post noted that fewer people were being deported than under Biden and that is still true despite a massive buildup of the agency’s staff, surveillance technology, and detention centers to the tune of seventeen billion dollars.

When Biden left office, ICE had around 7,000 employees. Since then 12,000 more have been onboarded. When an organization expands as fast as that, when money is no obstacle, there are bound to be growing pains and wasted efforts. Or insufficient efforts, such as reducing the training time for new recruits, the majority of whom lack law enforcement backgrounds and many of whom seem to be white nationalists or MAGAt bozos attracted by signing bonuses and bounty payments.

In the wake of the murders of Renee Good and Alex Pretti, Trump, Noem, Miller, and Patel have slandered the victims and lied through their teeth about what happened to them, and even GOP congressmen are expressing concern about the incidents and the ongoing cover-ups. Trump has gotten the message and posted on TruthSocial to Democratic leaders to “formally cooperate with the Trump Administration” rather than “resist and stoke the flames of Division, Chaos, and Violence.”

He should know. That’s what he and many of his MAGA followers have been doing for years, notably at the US Capitol on January 6, 2021, but also murdering politicians and suing others, and threatening judges and election officials.

How Homeland Security and the White House have mismanaged the situation in Minneapolis is technically known as a clusterfuck, per the US Marine Corps. Minnesotan’s nice people don’t deserve this and, were I them, would consider making Minnesota a province of Canada. They’re made for each other.

But just because the Feds can’t get their signals straight doesn’t mean ICE lacks signal intelligence, SIGINT as the FBI and CIA like to call it. DHS is sitting on a huge trove of personal data about Americans gleaned from a multitude of files DOGE stole from various agencies as well as police departments, courts, social media data brokers and other sources that includes names, addresses, phone numbers and even where people drive. This is how they turn up at the homes of targets and even some protest organizers. They know where you live, or can if they want to.

But now we know how they consume that data, thanks to software developed by Palantir called ELITE, which lets its users gather data about people nominated as targets and sift through it. We know what they can do with it thanks to a copy of the ELITE user manual recently obtained by 404 Media:

404 Media is publishing a version of the user guide for ELITE, which lets ICE bring up dossiers on individual people and provides a “confidence score” of their address.

404 Media is not publishing the original document for source protection reasons, but has retyped a version below. 404 Media has made some formatting tweaks for clarity and reconstructed some of the images in the guide (some of the images in the original are blurred). We previously did similar with an internal Palantir wiki in which the company explained its work with ICE.

The ELITE user guide starts with this overview:

Followed by:

1. Elite Workflow
2. Home Screen
3. Lead Sourcing, and UID Search.
4. Geospatial Lead Sourcing Tab
5. Special Operations Filter
6. Enforcement Review Queue
7. Planning Queue
8. Dispositioning

See 404 Media’s version of the ELITE user guide here. Operators can target by address, by phone location, or define a zone on a map to search for targets. When they locate a target they can search its vicinity for other persons of interest. They have access to Social Security numbers, court records, identities of co-inhabitants, immigration and travel documents, employment and educational history, fingerprints and even DNA samples. Given all that, calling anyone in the EID database undocumented seems like an oxymoron, but you don’t have to be an alien to show up in that compendium.

Field agents have access to EID info via a mobile app called EDDIE, that can record and upload fingerprints and photographs of a person to learn what the system knows about them. This is what enabled an ICE agent to freak out a Minneapolis protestor by addressing her by her first name. And while any cop can look up a vehicle’s registration to see who owns it, DHS knows a lot more than that. That report from Minnesota Public Radio says “Minnesota Driver and Vehicle Services said in a statement that they don’t provide ICE access to citizens’ private data,” but ICE nevertheless has it. The news report goes on to say:

Jac Kovarik is a block club captain in south Minneapolis who has observed ICE since the surge began.

The first time Kovarik saw private data used by ICE agents was a couple days after Christmas. They were observing ICE agents while a friend from Robbinsdale drove. The agents had already stopped them to warn they’d be arrested, but they kept following the vehicle. Then they realized the agents were leading them to their friend’s home in Robbinsdale.

“He pulled up to her house, both the agents got out of the car and were both performatively and theatrically taking pictures of her house,” Kovarik said. “Then they drove off and they went around to the back alley behind her house and took pictures of the back of her house.”

It happened again to Kovarik last week when an ICE agent led them to a residence where Kovarik used to live.

[On 1/30/25 The New York Times ran an article based on 404 Media’s disclosures (gift link)]

Another source for vehicular information are thousands of traffic cameras equipped with licenses plate readers from a company called Flock Safety. 404 Media has demonstrated that in many jurisdictions logs of data collected by Flock cameras is on the open internet for anyone to peruse, as are their locations. There is even a website called haveibeenflocked.com that lets anyone search the compromised files and provides instructions for requesting audit logs (lists of search requests by law enforcement agencies) from a jurisdiction. I have no reason to doubt ICE has access to that data as well.

Trump’s tweet to Minnesota Governor Walz and Minneapolis Mayor Frye insists they let their local law enforcement agencies (LEAs) cooperate and exchange information with ICE. Thousands of state and local LEAs have already done so, including the Massachusetts Department of Corrections, which signed a Memorandum of Agreement (MOA) in June 2020. Among many other things, the document states “The LEA agrees to cooperate with any Federal investigation related to this MOA to the full extent of its available powers, including providing access to appropriate databases, personnel, individuals in custody and documents.” Find the full text of that MOA here.

And so, should you be afraid to protest when ICE is in town? Maybe, but do it anyway, do it as a group, and wear a mask. At this point, they will be leery of recapitulating what happened in Minnesota. If they cuff and charge you, know that the law is not on their side and you’ll win the case, though not without trepidation, inconvenience, and expense. On the bright side, you’ll make new friends and earn a bit of well-deserved notoriety.

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