The president’s chief immigration hawk has a substantial amount of stock in Palantir, one of ICE’s most prominent contractors
White House Deputy Chief of Staff Stephen Miller’s obsession with kicking millions of undocumented immigrants out of the country is a byproduct of his hateful ethnonationalism — but he also stands to make a pretty penny off the administration’s deportation agenda.
According to ethics disclosure reports released by the White House, Miller owns between $100,000 and $250,000 worth of stock in Palantir, Peter Thiel’s data and intelligence software company that has a several lucrative contracts with Immigrations and Customs Enforcement (ICE) to track data and conduct surveillance on undocumented immigrants. It’s a pretty clear conflict of interest from the man behind much of Donald Trump’s immigration policy, in an administration that is already rife with corruption.
A Project on Government Oversight (POGO) analysis of disclosures from several administration figures found that Miller and at least 11 other White House officials and staffers own stock in Palantir, including Gregory Barbaccia, Trump’s Chief Information Officer.
Miller’s stake is tucked away in a brokerage account for one of his three young children, all of which are under the age of six. The single degree of separation is still a potential violation of ethics laws.
Palantir has been a critical player in the Trump administration’s efforts to execute the mass deportation of undocumented migrants. The company received a $41 million government contract in 2014, and created custom software for ICE, referred to as Investigative Case Management (ICM). The platform synthesizes massive troves of data on undocumented migrants from various federal and private law enforcement agencies, creating extremely detailed files that are used to craft deportation cases on individuals, and locate them for arrest and detention.
According to an April report from Wired, ICE awarded Palantir another $30 million contract to create tracking software aimed at providing the agency with “near real-time visibility” into migrants engaging in “self deportation.” According to documents obtained by Wired, one of the core functions of the program — dubbed ImmigrationOS — would be to streamline and prioritize “selection and apprehension operations of illegal aliens.” The documents noted that one of the difficulties in creating the program was limited access to the biometric data of migrants.
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Last month, reports emerged that Miller had yelled at regional ICE field officers because they weren’t rounding up and deporting people fast enough, demanding they achieve a target of 3,000 arrests a day.
What’s becoming clear is that immigration enforcement officials are no longer carefully sifting through data on undocumented migrants in order to round up the criminals that Trump promised would be the primary targets of his crackdown, but casting a drag net over entire communities.
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Several citizens and lawful residents have reportedly been swept up in ICE raids — some held in detention for days or weeks without explanation. One woman, a citizen who was arrested alongside her undocumented husband by immigration authorities, was detained in her ninth month of pregnancy and hospitalized with pains after her release. Another undocumented woman, Iris Dayana Monterroso-Lemus, miscarried in her fifth month of pregnancy after days of pleading with guards at the detention facility she was taken to for medical attention.
This is what Miller and the Trump administration have desired for some time. According to former Trump Department of Homeland Security appointee Miles Taylor, Miller once proposed using predator drones to “obliterate” ships carrying migrants seeking to land on U.S. soil. It should be no surprise that as Miller moves to fulfill his most vile nativist anti-immigrant fantasies, he’s ensured himself a cut of the profits.
