ICE Plans Central Database of Health, Labor, Housing Agency Data to Find Targets

Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) is planning to bring together data from a wide variety of other U.S. government agencies, including the Department of Labor (DOL), Health and Human Services (HHS), Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD), and the Internal Revenue Service (IRS) to make a centralized database to identify immigration targets, according to a document viewed by 404 Media.

The news signals ICE’s heavy emphasis on bringing disparate datasets together in order to carry out President Trump’s mass deportation effort. The tool, called ATrac and “Alien Tracker” in the document, is planned to allow for the management of all enforcement priorities, and provide near real-time tracking of both targets on a local level and the broader set of immigration enforcement targets around the country.

The document says ATrac is an ICE tool that displays information on a geospatial interface for officials to identify potential enforcement targets, and then task that enforcement to a particular team. Once a team is sent out, they are required to report the ultimate outcome, such as the target being arrested; the target being located but not arrested; or the target not being located.

The document says ATrac already includes information from the Social Security Administration (SSA) and U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services (USCIS). It also includes data from law enforcement agencies such as the FBI, Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives (ATF), and the U.S. Marshals Service (USMS), according to the document.

Other agencies planned for inclusion named in the document, such as HUD, HHS, and DOL, are not ordinarily associated with immigration enforcement. Earlier this month the IRS said it would provide data to ICE for immigration enforcement efforts. 

Neither HUD, HHS, DOL, nor ICE responded to a request for comment. 

The document also says that each target in the tool includes information from TRSS, an apparent reference to Thomson Reuters Special Services. The company was previously criticized during the first Trump administration for assisting ICE with the “identification and location of aliens.” Thomson Reuters did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

It is not clear how ATrac’s data collection and analysis would fit in with other reported ICE databases or tools, and whether it is distinct or related to those projects. On Thursday, U.S. Representative Gerry Connolly said in a letter to the oversight body for the Social Security Administration (SSA) that an agency whistleblower reported members of DOGE were building a “master database” using data from SSA, IRS, and HHS. On Friday, WIRED reported DOGE was working on a master database which includes data from SSA, voting records, and biometric data which could track immigrants. The Washington Post reported that ICE and DOGE were seeking access to Medicare data.

On Wednesday, 404 Media reported ICE paid Palantir tens of millions of dollars for “complete target analysis of known populations.” A day later, 404 Media reported that Palantir recently engaged in a three-week sprint and is now working on a six month project with ICE “concentrated on delivering prototype capabilities,” according to a leak of internal Palantir Slacks and other messages. ICE published a document about that same development effort, called ImmigrationOS.

Those leaked Palantir messages said Homeland Security Investigations (HSI), a part of ICE, developed its own in-house system called RAVEn, before coming back to Palantir in late 2024 after that project failed. In the new document obtained by 404 Media, it says officials access the ATrac tool through RAVEn. A privacy impact assessment published by the Department of Homeland Security in March says RAVEn “will not replace ICE’s traditional criminal investigatory case management systems. Rather, RAVEn will primarily perform large, complex analytical projects at HSI.”