‘Uncanny Valley’: ICE’s Secret Expansion Plans, Palantir Workers’ Ethical Concerns, and AI Assistants

Brian Barrett: They have 80 billion or so to spend, 75 billion of that I think they have to spend in the next four years. So yes, they are going to keep expanding. And when you think about how much of an impact 3,000 agents have had in Minneapolis alone, it’s like an eighth of the … they can replicate some version of that in many different places.

Leah Feiger: And I’ve, frankly, given a shout out to the many local reporters around the country who have contacted me in the past day or so, just to ask questions about the locations we’ve mentioned that are near them or in their states or cities. And the thing that keeps coming up to me is that in addition to new buildings, they’re putting them in existing government buildings, existing leases, or that seems to be the plan. And then we also found that a bunch of these ICE offices are located near plans for giant immigration detention warehouses, and we’re looking at offices being set up, say 20 minutes, an hour and 20 minutes away from that. Yes. So we’re looking at different … the triangulation of these around you have to have your attorneys, your agents, a place to get their orders and put their computers and in some ways do very mundane things that are required of an operation like this one.

Brian Barrett: Well, Leah, that’s a good point. I think when people hear “ICE offices” or when I do, just instinctively, I think of ICE as guys with guns and masks and all that, but that’s not exactly what we’re saying here. Care to talk about what these offices seem to be lining up to be used for and by whom? Because ICE isn’t just the masked guys with bad tattoos.

Leah Feiger: Yes, absolutely. So what we also reported in this story was some of the specific parts of ICE that actually reached out to GSA and asked them to expedite the process of getting new leases and so forth, which included, for example, representatives from OLA. OLA is ICE’s Office of the Chief Legal Counsel. So it’s the lawyers, it’s the ICE lawyers that work with the courts and argue back whether deportation orders say yes, no, et cetera, sign the documents, put everything in front of judges. This is a very important part of this whole operation that we don’t talk about a ton. There is a lot of focus on the DOJ. There is a lot of focus. There was an excellent article this week in Politico talking about all these federal judges who are really, really upset that DHS and ICE are ignoring their requests that immigrants not be detained anymore.

The missing layer of it is the lawyers who are part of this representing ICE to the US government here, and that is OLA. So they reached out extensively to GSA, as we report, to acquire these rental locations, specifically with the OLA legal request. I just want to find out how big it is. ICE has repeatedly outlined its expansion into cities across the US. And this one piece of memorandum that we got from OLA stated that ICE would expand its legal operations to Birmingham, Alabama; Fort Lauderdale, Fort Myers, Jacksonville, and Tampa, Florida; Des Moines, Iowa; Boise, Idaho; Louisville, Kentucky; Baton Rouge, Louisiana; Grand Rapids, Michigan; St. Louis, Missouri; Raleigh, North Carolina; Long Island, New York; Columbus, Ohio; Oklahoma City, Oklahoma; Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania; Charleston and Columbia, South Carolina; Nashville, Tennessee; Richmond, Virginia; Spokane, Washington; Coeur d’Alene, Idaho; and Milwaukee, Wisconsin. We also have other locations in the rest of the article, but these are the requests of OLA.