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

Brian Barrett: They’ve got 80 billion or so to spend, 75 billion of that I think they have to spend in the next four years. So yeah, they’re going to keep expanding. And when you think of how much of an impact 3,000 agents officers had in Minneapolis alone, that’s like an eighth of the … they can repeat some version of that in a lot of different spots.

Leah Feiger: And I’ve been fielding, honestly, shout out to the many local reporters around the country who’ve been contacting me in the last day or so, just to ask questions about the locations that we named that are near them or in their states or cities. And the thing to me that keeps coming up is that in addition to new buildings, they’re getting put into preexisting government buildings, preexisting leases, or that appears to be the plan. And then we’ve also found that a bunch of these ICE offices are being 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 for these. Yeah. So we’re looking at different … the triangulation of this around you have to have your lawyers, your agents, have a place to get their orders and put their computers and do in some ways 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. Do you mind talking through what these offices seem to be queued up to be used for and by whom? Because ICE is not just the masked guys with bad tattoos.

Leah Feiger: Yes, absolutely. So what we reported in this story as well 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, et cetera, included in that, for example, were representatives from OLA. OLA is ICE’s office of the principal legal adviser. So that’s the lawyers, those are the ICE lawyers that are working with the courts and arguing back or deportation orders saying yes, no, et cetera, signing the documents, putting everything in front of judges. This is a really important part of this entire operation that we’re not talking about a ton. There’s a lot of focus on the DOJ. There’s a lot of focus. There was an excellent article this week in Politico talking about all of these federal judges that are really, really upset that DHS and ICE are ignoring their requests for immigrants to not be detained anymore.

The missing level of that is the lawyers that are part of this that are representing ICE to the US government here, and that’s OLA. So they’ve reached out to GSA extensively, as we report, to get these leasing locations, specifically with the OLA legal request. I just want to get across how big this is. ICE repeatedly outlined its expansion to cities around the US. And this one piece of memorandum that we got from OLA stated that ICE will be expanding its legal operations into 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 have other locations as well throughout the rest of the article, but those are the requests from OLA.