Immigration to the United States and customs law enforcement exploits by Palantir generative artificial intelligence tools to sort and summarize immigration application guidance from its public submission form, according to an inventory released Wednesday of all Department of Homeland Security use cases for AI in 2025.
The AI Enhanced ICE Tip Processing service is intended to help ICE investigators “more quickly identify and implement tips” for urgent cases, as well as translate submissions that are not written in English, according to the inventory. It also provides a “BLUF”, defined as a “high-level summary of the trick”, produced using at least one large language model. BLUF, or “bottom line up front”, is a military term used also used internally by certain Palantir employees.
DHS says the software is “actively authorized” to support ICE operations, adding that the tool helps reduce “the tedious manual effort required to review and categorize incoming tips.” The date AI-enhanced tip processing “became operational” is listed in the inventory as May 2, 2025.
The DHS inventory does not provide much detail on the broad language models Palantir uses to generate BLUFs; however, it notes that ICE uses “large, commercially available language models” that have been “trained on public domain data by their vendors.”
“There has been no additional training using agency data beyond what is available in the models’ core capability set,” the inventory also notes. “During operation, AI models interact with submitted tips.”
The “DHS 2025 AI Use Case Inventory” published Wednesday on the DHS website, has been published annually since 2022. The 2024 version of the inventory does not mention the use of AI to process tip line submissions.
Palantir has been a major ICE contractor since 2011 and provides a comprehensive set of analytical tools to the agency. However, until now, almost nothing was known about Palantir’s advice on processing work for ICE.
This work was once mentioned in the description of a $1.96 million Palantir. payment that ICE made in September 2025. The payment was to modify the Investigative Case Management (ICM) system—a version of Gotham, Palantir’s out-of-the-box law enforcement product that stores information on current or past ICE investigations, to include the Tipline and Investigative Leads Suite.
The description does not include any other details about Palantir’s work on this “Tipline” integration.
However, the “AI Enhanced ICE Tip Processing” tool may be an update to “FALCON Tipline”, which replaced ICE’s old 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 2021The FALCON Tipline processes information submitted by the public or law enforcement agencies regarding “suspected illegal activity” or “suspicious activity” to ICE’s Homeland Security Investigations (HSI) Tipline Unit. ICE appears to have only one reporting line, but submissions can be made online or by phone.
An entry in a federal register in December 2025 notes that when HSI receives a tip, investigators in its Tipline unit run “queries” against various “DHS, law enforcement, and immigration databases.” After analyzing these results, HSI agents write “investigative reports” and then forward the information to the appropriate DHS offices. It is unclear to what extent this workflow may be facilitated by recently enhanced AI processing.
Data from FALCON Tipline, Palantir ICM and several other databases are ingested and made searchable by the FALCON Search and Analysis System, a separate but similarly named tool also developed by Palantir.
