United States Immigration and Customs Enforcement is using Palantir’s intelligence generation tools to organize and summarize immigration enforcement advice in a publicly posted form, according to a list released Wednesday of all use cases the Department of Homeland Security had for AI by 2025.
The AI Enhanced ICE Tip Processing service is intended to help ICE investigators “quickly identify and provide actionable tips” in emergency situations, as well as translate posts not made in English, according to the inventory. It also provides a “BLUF,” defined as a “high-level summary of a tip,” which is generated using at least one major language model. BLUF, or “bottom line up front,” is a military term also used internally by some Palantir employees.
DHS says the software is “actively validated” to support ICE operations, adding that the tool helps reduce the “time-consuming manual efforts required to review and classify incoming tips.” The date when AI-enhanced tip processing “goes live” is listed in the inventory as May 2, 2025.
The DHS inventory does not provide much information about the types of major languages used by Palantir to produce BLUFs; however, it notes that ICE uses “commercially available large-scale linguistic models” that were “trained on public domain data by its suppliers.”
“There was no additional training using the agency’s data beyond what is available from the basic model set,” the inventory notes. “At runtime, AI models interact with tip posts.”
The “2025 DHS AI Use Case Inventory,” published Wednesday on the DHS website, is published annually starting in 2022. The 2024 version of the list does not mention using AI to process tip line submissions.
Palantir has been ICE’s prime contractor since 2011, and provides a sweeping set of analytical tools for the agency. So far, however, almost nothing is known about Palantir’s ICE processing tips.
This work was mentioned in the description of a $1.96 million payment to Palantir made by ICE in September 2025. The payment was to replace the Investigative Case Management System (ICM)—a version of Palantir’s off-the-shelf law enforcement product, Gotham, which stores information about current or former ICE investigations—to include “Investigative Suitepline.”
The description does not include other details about Palantir’s work in this “tip” compilation.
However, the “AI Enhanced ICE Tip Processing” tool may be an update to the “FALCON Tipline,” which replaced the previous ICE tip processing system around 2012.
Palantir, ICE, and DHS did not immediately respond to requests for comment.
According to a DHS document last updated in 2021, the FALCON Tipline processes tips submitted by the public or law enforcement agencies about “suspected illegal activity” or “suspicious activity” to ICE’s Homeland Security Investigations (HSI) Unit Tipline. ICE appears to have only one tip line, but referrals can be made online or by phone.
A December 2025 federal register entry notes that when HSI receives a tip, investigators within the Tip Unit conduct “questions” with various “data” from “DHS, law enforcement, and immigration databases.” After analyzing these results, HSI agents write “investigative reports” and forward the tips to the appropriate offices within DHS. It’s unclear how much of this workflow can be helped by new AI-enhanced processing.
Data from the FALCON Tipline, Palantir’s ICM, and several other databases were fed and analyzed by the FALCON Search & Analysis System, a separate but similarly named tool developed by Palantir.
