How Palantir, Microsoft, Amazon, and Google Power Trump’s Immigration Crackdown


ICE also purchased at least one “tailored” training session for staff to use Microsoft Teams. FPDS details reveal that the training will focus on developing “documents” for the office to manage the 287(g) program, which deputizes enrolled state and local agencies to work with ICE. “Automated documents” are also mentioned, but nothing in the FPDS reveals exactly what those are, or what their role is in the 287(g) program.

Christopher Muhawe, an assistant professor of law at the University of Illinois Chicago—who has studied the psychological effects of America’s immigration monitoring infrastructure — argued that people seeking asylum or refugee status in the US, including the “security and safety” it can provide, are “inherently vulnerable” to the federal immigration monitoring state, and can cause anxiety and “advance damage to a person’s health.”

“There is not enough protection for these individuals,” Muhawe said.

Microsoft did not return WIRED’s request for comment.

Amazon

CBP and ICE use Amazon cloud storage to support their operations.

Federal payment records reveal that ICE is a customer of Amazon’s “GovCloud,” a VERSIONS on AWS which the company says has increased security specifications for “sensitive workloads.” According to a slide presentation Uploaded to SAM, the federal award management system, in July 2023, Palantir’s ICM runs on AWS.

The same document says Amazon also has power over the “ICE Cloud,” a key piece of infrastructure for the agency. The ICE Cloud hosts the agency’s “Digital Records Manager,” “Data Warehouse,” and the “Law Enforcement Information Sharing Service” (LEIS Service), according to the 2023 slide presentation. DHS CEBU the LEIS Service in 2019 as “a backend super highway data sharing system” between ICE and other law enforcement agencies.

The 2023 slide presentation shows that the ICE Cloud also hosts the “PRIME Interface Hub,” which DHS said “Sends queries to and from” the other two locations. The first is ICE’s Enforcement Integrated Database, which DHS said Contains records of “investigations, arrests, bookings, detentions, and removals” for persons encountered or apprehended by ICE, CBP, or US Citizenship and Immigration Services. The second is “TECS” (which DHS said not now an acronym, but once stood for “Treasury Enforcement Communications System”), CBP’s “information sharing platform” that allows authorized users to access CBP databases containing information about anyone who entered the US by plane, ship, car, or foot, and any property seized at the border.

Amazon also powers ICE’s “Student and Exchange Visitor Program Automated Information Management System”. ACCORDING to September 2025 transaction. It appears to be a tool within, or another term for, the Student and Exchange Visitor Information System, which stores information about people studying in the US.

Two FPDS payments—albeit made in 2020 and 2022, before the period reviewed by WIRED—are important enough to mention. They revealed that Amazon provides infrastructure for the ICE Repository for Analytics in a Virtualized Environment (RAVEn), a tool for agents analyze “Raw or unanalyzed datasets”—including documents, photos, audio, and other data—in more than a dozen federal databases. A DHS Office of the Inspector General report from 2023 describing RAVEn as an “internally developed” tool. It includes a leading “search and analytic tool,” a tool for sharing “lead referrals and results” with HSI field offices, and a mobile app.



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