The Winepress

ICE is deploying a new tool called ELITE, powered by Palantir, to track Americans and illegals, using predictive models and scores to determine where someone might travel so ICE can make arrests.

Last week, a clip on social media went viral that depicts an ICE agent in Portland, Maine telling a woman that she has photographed, filmed, placed in a database and is now considered a “domestic terrorist.”

Woman: “Why are you taking my information down?”

ICE: “Because we have a nice little database, and now you’re considered a domestic terrorist.”

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This appears to be a reoccurring theme with ICE.

According to Ken Klippenstein, a federal law enforcement official with ICE told the investigative journalist that the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) has ordered immigration officers to gather identifying information about anyone filming them and to “send that information to Intel who will do a ‘work-up’ on them.” “Meaning, trying to identify them via social media, running their license plates if available, and running a criminal history check,” the anonymous federal source explained.

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Klippenstein reported:

The directive is part of a sweeping, nationwide effort by U.S. immigration authorities to identify anyone and everyone trying to film their conduct. This includes not just ICE but other Department of Homeland Security agencies like Border Patrol as well.

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If you recall, ICE agents were seen filming Renee Nicole Good’s vehicle before she was fatally shot in the head several times.

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This then begs the question, is this one of the underlying reasons why ICE is doing what they are doing? After all, they were given tons of new biometric tools from a new round of funding last year.

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Last week, Biometric Update published a startling report on ICE’s AI predictive tool called ELITE, powered by Palantir. “Backed by $160 million in contracts, ICE’s dystopian tech enforcement architecture is straining long-standing legal boundaries,” said author Anthony Kimery.

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Last summer, it was revealed President Donald Trump contracted Palantir to compile every American’s private and personal data, including DNA, to create a master database. A number of departments received access to Palantir’s products, particularly the DHS and Palantir’s Foundry software.

The WinePress has further explained what Palantir does in other reports and why there is so much controversy surrounding the company. Palantir founder Peter Thiel is a major donor to Donald Trump and JD Vance. Business Reform also had a good title for the company: “Palantir: Because There Are Some Lines Google Won’t Cross.”

The Trump administration has already begun creating a list of “extremists” in the U.S.

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But DHS and ICE have been given even more biometric tools to use at their disposal.

Building off of this databasing, ICE uses its cameras and phones for facial recognition to match identities in their database, even on children. Now a lawsuit has been filed after minors in Chicago were detained by ICE for not being able to provide legal ID, even though they are minors and were not granted state-registered IDs.

Again, as reported by Kimery from Biometric Update (excerpts):

When masked federal agents stopped two teenagers riding their bikes near an Illinois high school last fall, the encounter followed a now familiar script. The agents demanded proof of citizenship. One of the teenagers, who said he was 16 and a U.S. citizen, told the agents he had a school ID, but did not have it on him.

According to a lawsuit filed by the State of Illinois and the City of Chicago, one agent then asked another, “Can you do facial?” The other agent pointed a cell phone at the teenager, appearing to take a photo of his face.

That moment, captured not by body camera footage but by sworn allegations, has become emblematic of a shift now under legal scrutiny as mobile facial recognition expands into everyday encounters with children far from the border and outside the controlled settings DHS has traditionally used to justify biometric identification.

The lawsuit accuses the DHS, component agencies ICE and Customs and Border Protection (CBP), and senior Trump administration officials, of operating an unlawful interior enforcement regime built around coercive stops and the routine use of mobile biometric tools.

Among its most serious allegations is that DHS agents have used facial recognition on minors who are U.S. citizens without consent, individualized suspicion, or meaningful public limits on retention and sharing.

At the center of the case is DHS’s use of Mobile Fortify, a field-deployed application that scans fingerprints and performs facial recognition, then compares collected data against multiple DHS databases, including CBP’s Traveler Verification Service, Border Patrol systems, and Office of Biometric Identity Management’s Automated Biometric Identification System.

[…] The lawsuit cites a DHS Privacy Threshold Analysis stating that ICE agents may use Mobile Fortify when they “encounter an individual or associates of that individual,” and that agents “do not know an individual’s citizenship at the time of initial encounter” and use Mobile Fortify to determine or verify identity.

The same passage, as quoted in the complaint, authorizes collection in identifiable form “regardless of citizenship or immigration status,” acknowledging that a photo captured could be of a U.S. citizen or lawful permanent resident.

The lawsuit further alleges DHS retains biometric data collected through Mobile Fortify, regardless of citizenship or age, for up to fifteen years. If that claim is borne out, children subjected to brief street encounters could carry a biometric record into adulthood without being charged, arrested, or even suspected of wrongdoing.

DHS policy, according to the report, claims they have a respected age policy but there are no aptly defined guardrails.

Department-wide use of facial recognition and face capture technology was permitted under the Biden administration in 2023 issued under Directive 026-11. It states that DHS “does not collect, use, disseminate, or retain” biometric data for protected individuals including age, but “does not require parental notice or consent, does not mandate shortened retention periods for juvenile data, and does not impose a child-specific proportionality analysis,” Kimery noted.

The author adds:

That omission becomes decisive once facial recognition migrates from controlled checkpoints into coercive street encounters, where a teenager cannot meaningfully opt out and a child confronted by armed agents cannot meaningfully consent.

Directive 026-11 also draws a bright line around enforcement. It clearly states that facial recognition used for identification “may not be used as the sole basis for law or civil enforcement related actions,” and potential matches must be manually reviewed by human examiners before action is taken.

That safeguard reflects DHS’s recognition that facial recognition is probabilistic and context-dependent, and it is meant to prevent automation-driven enforcement.

In street-level encounters involving minors, however, a facial scan can function as de facto identity confirmation in real time, shaping how agents question, detain, or release a child, even if no arrest follows.

The lawsuit goes even further to assert that the Trump administration rescinded this directive sometime on or around February 14th, 2025.

Kimery concludes:

For minors, that uncertainty has a human cost. If children’s facial images are being captured during street encounters and retained for years, the public still lacks the basic documentation needed to understand how those images are stored, shared, audited, or removed.

[…] Memoranda of understanding governing biometric data sharing with state, local, or private partners are often withheld or heavily redacted. As a result, it is often impossible to trace how a child’s facial image moves from a brief encounter into DHS systems, vendor platforms, or partner databases, or whether it can ever be removed.

The consequences, however, are already playing out in public on sidewalks, near schools, and in the lives of children who may never know where their biometric identities now reside.

ICE agents confronting and detaining small children has increasingly occurred and come to the public forefront.

DHS plans to continue to invest in even more biometric technologies.

Last week, the DHS Science and Technology Directorate (S&T) published a Request for Information on different disciplines, to test and research, in the areas of include “behavioral economics and social science; communications and network systems; cybersecurity; software development and quality assurance; data science and analytics; biometrics; identity access and management; modeling and simulation; artificial intelligence; machine learning; autonomous systems; explosives; engineering; physics; biology; virology; and chemistry.”

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This is how you know we live in an oppressive society, that filming ICE agents will get you listed as a domestic terrorist. What’s the big deal? If everything is fine then why the secrecy? Why are Americans being treated as terrorists in our own country?

But such oppression and tyranny has been implemented since 9/11 with the Patriot Act where legal citizens are seen as terrorists in order to save us from terrorists… and it was also after 9/11 under Bush the DHS was created in the first place. Constitutionally, this department should be illegal. But the same hypocrites who once chastised the Patriot Act and Bush’s so-called War on Global Terror, foreign and domestic, are now perfectly fine with it now. Of course, it has not directly affected this particular class of people; oh, but when it does eventually affect them then in some way, then they’ll whine and cry about their Constitutional rights.

It is important to emphasize that ICE under Trump has deported very few people, flying in the face of his campaign promises of mass-deportation, and has deported significantly less than President Obama and, at this pace, even President Biden, as I have previously documented; and once you remove self-deportations, the number really goes down.

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As a matter of fact, this administration is lauding all the people they’ve turned illegal to legal. “Under the Trump admin, we’ve sped up our process and added integrity to the visa programs, to green cards, to all of that, but also more people are becoming naturalized under this admin than ever before. More people are becoming citizens,” DHS Secretary Kristi Noem said in November. Furthermore, this administration has been very taciturn on H-1B and other visa programs, and its refusal to seriously tighten the loopholes and abuses. Charging companies a fee does not solve the issue as big-tech especially will continue to pay out (and they are) to get these cheap wage workers on shore.

With this in mind —

I think we can now see why deportations are so low. ICE is not deporting, they are databasing. The DHS is being used to usher in digital ID and tokenized economics under the guise of tackling immigration.

Bear in mind also that Noem recently confirmed that ICE will be asking citizens to prove their identities, but REAL ID will not suffice in many cases.

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So now ICE brags about databasing Americans — which bleeds into big-brother tech bros such as Palantir and Oracle, who will feed every little bit about us into their AI systems for the purpose of social credit scores, mass 24/7 surveillance, and retroactively affecting digital ID wallets in a tokenized economy.

It does not take a genius to see where this is all headed. As always, this right vs left fedslop psyop is designed to make you focus on the wrong things and not observe the nasty underbelly. Set up some bad actors and paid shills to go around and heckle ICE and police, wait for these severely undertrained and undisciplined ICE goons to make a new kneejerk and hair trigger response (literally), and then in comes broader militarization and tokenized social credit scores.

It also does not take a genius to see that this system will quickly expand to anyone who questions the administration and the polices of it.

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Via https://thewinepress.substack.com/p/ice-admits-to-databasing-americans