DOGE is building a master database for immigration enforcement, sources say

By Priscilla Alvarez, Sunlen Serfaty, Marshall Cohen and Tami Luhby, CNN

(CNN) — Staffers from Elon Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency are building a master database to speed-up immigration enforcement and deportations by combining sensitive data from across the federal government, multiple sources familiar with the plans tell CNN.

The goal is to create a massive repository of data pulled from various agencies, according to sources familiar with the project who spoke on the condition of anonymity because they aren’t authorized to talk about it. The administration has previously sought to centralize information from a number of agencies, including the Internal Revenue Service, the Social Security Administration and Health and Human Services, among others.

Palantir, a Silicon Valley data-analytics company co-founded by a Musk ally that has been used by immigration officials before for criminal investigations, is involved in building out the database. The company has long been ingesting and processing data from multiple ICE and DHS sources. The latest endeavor, however, is expected to go further by identifying people with civil immigration violations.

“If they are designing a deportation machine, they will be able to do that,” a former senior IRS employee with knowledge of the plans told CNN.

Allowing streamlined access to highly protected information – for immigration enforcement purposes – has been the subject of ongoing legal challenges. Democratic lawmakers have slammed the plan, with one claiming DOGE is “rapidly, haphazardly, and unlawfully” exploiting Americans’ personal data.

Trump officials see the project as a way to overcome a major hurdle: quickly building “targeting lists” that Immigration and Customs Enforcement can use to find, detain and deport migrants in the US. It’s part of a concerted effort, under pressure from the White House, to ramp up enforcement and increase deportations.

CNN has reached out to the Department of Homeland Security, Palantir and DOGE for comment. It’s unclear when the master database will be operational.

Palantir was co-founded by Peter Thiel, a Musk ally who has been a Trump supporter and donor. The company’s CEO, Alex Karp, is a Democratic donor and backed Kamala Harris last year.

Palantir is already a well-known government contractor, including at the IRS, so it would be a “logical choice” for the DOGE teams to utilize it, a senior IRS official said, adding that, “it would be easy to change the scope of existing contracts and pay Palantir to do this stuff.”

“They’re going to take the information we already have and put it into a system,” a Trump administration official told CNN about DOGE’s plans. “It will be able to rapidly queue information. Everyone is converting to Palantir.”

The DHS contract with Palantir includes “streamlining selection and apprehension operations of illegal aliens,” and self-deportation tracking, according to public records on a federal contracting site. ICE currently uses Palantir’s software for Homeland Security investigations.

A big dataset would help immigration officials more quickly identify who is undocumented in the US and potentially eligible for deportation. So far, a challenge for officials has been building what they call “targeting lists” to arrest people without status. Some existing lists, sources say, have been riddled with errors, creating additional work for agents in the field to verify and vet information.

But former Homeland Security officials have expressed concern over Palantir’s capability to serve ICE Enforcement and Removal Operations because those operations also require an enormous amount of logistics planning. While Palantir has been useful for specific data sets, one former Homeland Security official argued it’s largely viewed as a “general purpose tool.”

“It’s still only as good as the data,” said the former Homeland Security official, stressing that while a database may be able to help identify who’s undocumented in the US, it would also need to include information on where that individual is in the immigration process. Not all people who are in the US undocumented are immediately removable.

The description for the services ICE is seeking from Palantir includes “streamlined end to end immigration Lifecyle from identification to removal,” including deportation logistics, according to a document posted on the Federal Register.

Details of the master immigration database and Palantir’s role were first reported by Wired.

In an interview with Time Magazine published on Friday, Trump said DOGE was assembling a database with Americans’ personal information “because we want to find waste, fraud, and abuse, and want to cut our costs.” Asked if any of the data would be used to round up migrants for deportations, Trump said, “not that I know of, no.”

Zeroing in on the IRS

Within days of Trump taking office, DOGE allies started clashing with career IRS officials as they tried to access closely guarded taxpayer databases. Over the objections of top IRS officials, they pushed through a data-sharing deal with ICE earlier this month. One former IRS employee previously told CNN it felt like a “hostile takeover” of the tax-collection agency.

There has been no public indication that IRS data has yet begun to flow to DHS since the data-sharing deal was signed on April 7.

A Treasury Department spokesperson in a statement to CNN denied that any taxpayer data was being used beyond the terms of the deal IRS signed with ICE.

“Congress has been very clear about the limited exceptions in which taxpayer information can be shared,” the spokesperson said in a statement to CNN. “The implication that taxpayer information is being inappropriately shared across government agencies is not only incorrect but dangerous.”

When DOGE staffers participated in a strategy session in Washington, DC, earlier this month, with the goal to streamline IRS technology, Palantir representatives were there too, according to the former senior IRS official with knowledge of the event.

The Treasury spokesperson described the event in statement to CNN as “a seminar of various strategy sessions” that included “long-time IRS engineers who have been identified as the most talented technical personnel,” with an overarching goal to “work diligently to create efficient systems” for the IRS.

The administration has made data-sharing across federal agencies an early priority. A March 20 executive order signed by Trump directs agency heads to remove “unnecessary barriers to Federal employees accessing Government data and promoting inter‑agency data sharing.”

Still, some of DOGE’s data-collection efforts have drawn lawsuits from various employee unions, immigrant-rights groups, and others who argued that privacy laws were being violated. A court filing from one of those cases, filed by several unions, shows that DOGE representatives were accessing data across agencies with a focus on immigration status.

In mid-March, a DOGE staffer working out of the Social Security Administration requested and was granted access to the US Citizenship and Immigration Services’ SAVE database, according to a court filing in the case. The database allows federal, state and local governments to verify people’s immigration status.

The DOGE staffer wrote in an email to Social Security leaders that such access is “absolutely critical to get detailed immigration status for non-citizen (Social Security numbers)” in order to find fraud and improper payments.

But some Democrats are raising red flags about DOGE staffers “infiltrating multiple agencies at once,” and “recklessly and haphazardly combining data without any verification or validation,” as one senior House Oversight Committee Democratic staffer put it to CNN.

“The Trump Administration’s troubling track record of mishandling sensitive data, including repeated breaches, improper disclosures, and politically driven data manipulation proves they cannot be trusted to consolidate vast stores of personal, financial, and biometric information into a centralized repository that can be more easily exploited for political ends,” the aide told CNN.

In a joint Fox News interview last month, Bessent and IRS-based DOGE staffer Sam Corcos, defended DOGE’s activities at the IRS, though most of their comments were focused on their efforts to improve the agency’s sluggish modernization efforts.

“I really care a lot about this country,” Corcos said, adding that “we actually have quite a lot of software talent on the ground, the people writing code,” but they haven’t been “empowered” by past agency leadership to do their engineering work more effectively.

Bessent praised DOGE’s role in the Trump administration: “Sam and his crew are making it more efficient to work for the American people. So, what’s wrong with it working better, cheaper, faster and with more privacy?”

A senior IRS official said career employees inside the agency are concerned about the Trump administration bringing in Palantir to exploit troves of taxpayer data as part of their push to speed up deportations.

Trump appointees and DOGE allies who amassed substantial power within the IRS overcame a major hurdle toward creating their own master database when they pushed through a controversial data-sharing deal this month between the IRS and ICE.

The IRS-ICE arrangement was crafted, according to the Trump administration, to comply with strict privacy laws governing when taxpayer data can be shared across agencies. Among other “safeguards” mentioned in the document, DHS will only ask for information on undocumented immigrants suspected of defying an existing deportation order.

Still, several career IRS executives raised alarms about the legality of the planned cooperation with ICE, and some even quit in protest.

But if the sharing of sensitive taxpayer data ultimately ends up happening, Palantir is a decent choice, the senior IRS official said, because “they are one of the more technologically apt companies.”

Legal concerns and Democratic pushback

A federal judge in DC is expected to rule in May on whether to block the IRS from sharing taxpayer data with ICE. Another federal judge in Maryland decided last week to extend restrictions on DOGE getting sweeping access to personal Social Security data.

“The Privacy Act is not toothless. Defendants cannot flout the law,” US District Judge Ellen Hollander wrote. “They are not exempt from a statute that Congress enacted to protect American citizens from overbroad and unnecessary access to their (personally identifiable information.)”

Virginia Rep. Gerry Connolly, the top Democrat on the House Oversight Committee, has touted whistleblowers that he claims have damning information about the DOGE plan.

These whistleblowers recently told Connolly’s office that DOGE is working to combine sensitive information from Social Security, IRS, HHS and other departments into a single, cross-agency database, he wrote last week in a letter to Social Security’s acting inspector general.

CNN has reached out to the Social Security Administration’s Office of the Inspector General for comment.

“In an apparent attempt to sidestep network security controls, the Committee has learned that DOGE engineers have tried to create specialized computers for themselves that simultaneously give full access to networks and databases across different agencies,” Connolly wrote.

“DOGE have assembled backpacks full of laptops, each with access to different agency systems, that DOGE staff is using to combine databases that are currently maintained separately,” Connolly continued, noting that such a database would “pose unprecedented operational security risks” by allowing a breach at one agency from spreading widely.

Connolly said he’s “concerned that DOGE is moving personal information across agencies without the notification required under the Privacy Act or related laws, such that the American people are wholly unaware their data is being manipulated in this way.”

Tanya Broder, a top attorney at the National Immigration Law Center said she is worried that errors in the master database could harm everyone, not just potential deportees.

“Even if the pretense is to target a small subset of people for removal, the effort will inevitably harm US citizens and people here legally,” she said. “All of us risk having privacy compromised. Citizens and immigrants live together – there’s no way to target a subset of undocumented people without harming citizens and lawful permanent residents.”

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