A partially unsealed court filing alleges that US Department of Homeland Security agents built dossiers on people observing ICE operations in Maine — including photos, licence plate numbers and address data — and stored them in a Palantir-built system.
The filing, reported by WIRED, is part of a proposed class action in federal court in Maine brought by four ICE observers: Elinor Hilton, Colleen Fagan, Polyxenia Pantos and Carlyn Williams. It was filed under seal in September; a redacted version became public on Friday.
What the filing says At the centre is 'Operation Catch of the Day', an immigration enforcement surge in Maine in January. The filing alleges that an agent identified as 'Agent J.C.' created records in the Investigative Case Management (ICM) database — which the government describes as the case-management system ICE's Homeland Security Investigations uses to document investigations — on at least six observers (the government says eight). Two people he filmed in a Home Depot car park were labelled 'Threat to Law Enforcement, Professional Protestor', according to the filing, and photos of them and others were sent to a Customs and Border Protection officer so he could run a facial-recognition search using an app called Mobile Query.
The most detailed sequence concerns 20 January. Pantos briefly watched and photographed an arrest in Portland, Maine, standing a few car lengths away beside their spouse's car. Hours later, per the filing, J.C. ran the plate and pulled a report on the owner — Williams — from Accurint, a LexisNexis law-enforcement database, listing her address, phone numbers and cohabitants. He allegedly circulated her photo to his team asking 'Was this the protestor', was told by another agent that it did not match the woman at the scene, and told colleagues he was 'adding them in ICM now'. That afternoon, the filing says, J.C. called Williams, identified himself only as 'the Department of Homeland Security', and told her she should encourage Pantos 'not to do anything like that in the future because people who are doing things like that might get added to a domestic terrorism watchlist'. In a deposition he testified that he warned her she would be arrested if she continued; government attorneys say he denies referencing a watchlist.
According to the government's own documents, Williams's ICM record states she was the registered owner of a vehicle used to 'interrupt ICE arrests' and that her driving-licence photo matched video of an 'aggressive woman [who] interject[ed] herself into an arrest'. A 2016 DHS privacy assessment notes that ICM automatically shares subject records with CBP's TECS system, where they act as 'lookout records' for screening travellers at the border.
The system Palantir won the contract to build ICM in 2014; it runs on the company's Gotham software, customised for ICE's operational needs. In 2022 ICE awarded Palantir a five-year ICM support contract initially valued at up to about $96 million, and in 2025 the agency added nearly $30 million to develop a platform called 'ImmigrationOS'.
The dispute DHS calls the case 'meritless'. A spokesperson said the underlying lawsuit 'is based on the lie that there is a database of "domestic terrorists" run by DHS'. The government's motion to dismiss argues the incidents were isolated, that DHS policy prohibits such conduct, and that J.C. made records on people he believed were potential threats to law enforcement and never attempted to nominate anyone to a terrorist watchlist. Former acting ICE director Todd Lyons told Rep. Maxwell Frost in April that ICE does not keep any database of US citizens protesting its activities, nor a separate standalone database of people it has not arrested or detained.
The plaintiffs — represented by JoAnna Suriani of Protect Democracy — say the practice had a chilling effect. According to the motion, Pantos stopped all ICE observation work after the call to Williams, who briefly continued and then stopped altogether. They are asking the court to archive Williams's records, bar DHS from using the information it collected about the plaintiffs against them, and prohibit agents in Maine from threatening observers with watchlists or following them to their homes. The filing also alleges drive-bys of observers' residences and says at least one observer must now be referred to secondary inspection every time she tries to cross the border, until at least January 2027.
Why it matters: it is a concrete test of whether domestic surveillance tooling built for investigations can be turned on people exercising First Amendment rights — and of how far the automatic sharing between a commercial case-management platform and border-screening systems extends.
