For years, little was known about the multibillion-dollar company that handles data for the US immigration enforcement agency. Now, a cache of emails, training documents and reports sheds light on how Palantir helps Ice with investigations and on-the-ground enforcement

For years, little was known about how Ice uses Palantir’s technology. The company has consistently described itself as a “data processor” and says it does not play an active role in any of its customers’ data collection efforts or what clients do with that information.

Now, a cache of internal Ice documents – including hundreds of pages of emails between Ice and Palantir, as well as training manuals, and reports on the use of Palantir products – offer some of the first real-world examples of how Ice has used Palantir in its investigations and during on-the-ground enforcement operations.

The documents, which were obtained by immigrant legal rights group Just Futures Law through a Freedom of Information Act request and reviewed by the Guardian, largely cover Palantir’s contract with Homeland Security Investigations (HSI), the investigative arm of Ice that is responsible for stopping the “illegal movement of people, goods, money, contraband, weapons and sensitive technology”.

Palantir recently won a $30m contract to build the government a new platform called ImmigrationOS that will service Ice branches beyond HSI, and aims to “streamline” the identification and deportation of immigrants. While the documents are largely limited to HSI’s operations, it’s easy to see how the tools could be of use to other branches of Ice.

One document showed that agents could use Falcon to search for people’s names, known locations, vehicles or passport information against Department of Homeland Security (DHS) and other federal databases like the Enforcement Integrated Database (EID) – a vast database that holds biometric and personal information on anyone who has been encountered or arrested, detained or deported by any DHS agency – on the go.

In addition to collecting and analyzing field interviews, the agents used Falcon for “blueforce tracking”, a military term for tracking someone’s GPS location. Training documents show Ice agents could also use Falcon to track a person’s location, including their “route and movement”, hour by hour using cell phone tower records.