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The Trump administration's immigration and customs enforcement agency, ICE – which sparked outrage after killing US citizens Renee Good and Alex Pretti in Minneapolis on the grounds of them being "domestic terrorists" – is using digital surveillance for its mass deportation scheme built by the data firm Palantir, which previously developed tools to track protestors for the US Army, Byline Times can reveal.

Palantir, the giant US analytics firm co-founded by pro-Trump billionaire Peter Thiel, has major contracts with the UK's Department of Health and Social Care, and the Ministry of Defence.

The company has a £330 million contract as the lead supplier of the NHS' federated data programme, and a £240 million contract to provide analytics for the MoD. London is home to the company's biggest office outside of the United States.

In the US, the company's contracts with ICE stretch across a number of years, with obligations already exceeding $139 million and procurement documents describing future work worth hundreds of millions more in its mission to track down illegal migrants as part of President Donald Trump's mass deportation policy.

Both killings in the past month have been of protestors against ICE activity.

Good, a 37-year-old American citizen and mother of three, was fatally shot three times by ICE agent Jonathan Ross after she monitored his activities. Witnesses reported that agents gave conflicting commands – one told her to move her vehicle, while another shouted for her to exit.

Pretti, also 37, an intensive care unit nurse at a specialised medical centre operated by the US Department of Veterans Affairs, was holding his phone to film the activities of ICE officers and was trying to protect a woman who had been pepper-sprayed when he was shot on his knees in the back of the head.

It has since emerged that ICE agents reportedly had prior contact with Pretti a week earlier when he was protesting against ICE efforts to detain others. On that occasion, ICE attacked him and broke his ribs.

Sources told CNN that ICE officers have been collecting private information about protestors in Minneapolis and that the agency had "documented details" about Pretti before he was shot to death – raising the question of what information ICE is compiling about protestors.

The US Department of Homeland Security – of which ICE is the largest investigative arm – has denied creating a "database" of "domestic terrorists" or of having any record of the previous incident involving Pretti.

But analysis by Byline Times of official ICE procurement documents shows it has the capability to move from immigration enforcement to the suppression of protest – with Palantir first developing such technology for the Pentagon.

Domestic Surveillance

Two years into the first Trump administration, the Pentagon was revealed to be funding research to predict where anti-Trump protests would occur.

This work, led by the US Army Research Laboratory (ARL), involved scraping social media, tracking geolocation data, mapping social networks to identify influencers and organisers, crowd dynamics modelling, and building AI models to forecast dissent before it emerged.

One of the scientists behind the research, Lance Kaplan, working at the ARL, also published papers on the use of sensor fusion and network science to predict human behaviour from data streams. Another, Claire Bonial, listed research interests including "predicting social unrest using social media", "event detection", and "modelling emergent behaviour".

In 2018, Palantir began working directly with the US Army Research Laboratory.

In 2020, the company was awarded a $91 million contract for "artificial intelligence and machine learning development".

In 2021, the US Army claimed that ARL scientists had built models to "detect events from open-source information" and "identify patterns ...