According to the inventory, the AI Enhanced ICE Tip Processing service is intended to help ICE investigators “more quickly identify and take action” for urgent cases, as well as translate submissions not made in English. It also provides a “BLUF”, defined as a “high-level summary of the tip”, generated using at least one large language model. BLUF, or “Bottom Line Up Front”, is a military term also used internally by some Palantir employees.
DHS says the software is “being actively authorized in support of ICE operations,” adding that the tool helps reduce “the time-consuming manual effort required to review and classify incoming tips.” The AI-enhanced tip processing “turn on” date is listed in the inventory as May 2, 2025.
The DHS inventory does not provide much detail about the large language model used by Palantir to generate BLUF; However, it notes that ICE uses “commercially available large language models” that were “trained on public domain data by their providers.”
The inventory also reads, “There was no additional training using agency data on top of what is available in the base set of the model’s capabilities.” “During the operation, AI models interact with tip submissions.”
The “2025 DHS AI Use Case Inventory,” published Wednesday on DHS’s website, covers each year through 2022. The 2024 version of the inventory does not mention using AI to process tip line submissions.
Palantir has been a major ICE contractor since 2011, and it provides a comprehensive set of analytical tools for the agency. However, so far, almost nothing is known about Palantir’s work processing tips for ICE.
This work was mentioned once in a description of the $1.96 million Palantir payment made by ICE in September 2025. The payment was to modify the Investigative Case Management System (ICM) – a version of Palantir’s off-the-shelf law enforcement product, Gotham, which stores information about current or former ICE investigations – which includes the “Tipline and Investigative Leads Suite”.
The description does not include any other details about Palantir’s work on this “Tipline” integration.
However, the “AI Enhanced ICE Tip Processing” tool may be an update of “Falcon Tipline”, which replaced ICE’s previous tip-processing system around 2012.
Palantir, ICE and DHS did not immediately respond to requests for comment.
According to a DHS document last updated in 2021, the Falcon Tipline processes tips submitted by the public or law enforcement agencies to ICE’s Homeland Security Investigations (HSI) Tipline Unit about “suspected illegal activity” or “suspicious activity.” ICE appears to only have one tip line, but submissions can be made online or over the phone.
A Federal Register entry in December 2025 notes that when HSI receives a tip, investigators from its tipline unit run “queries” into various “DHS, law enforcement and immigration databases.” After analyzing these results, HSI agents write “investigative reports” and then send recommendations to the appropriate offices within DHS. It’s not clear exactly how much of this workflow might be aided by new AI-augmented processing.
Data from Falcon Tipline, Palantir’s ICM, and many other databases are ingested and made searchable by the Falcon Search and Analysis System, a separate but similarly named tool also developed by Palantir.
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