US immigration agents in Oregon used a custom-made app to identify neighborhoods and people to target, and had daily arrest quotas they sought to meet during operations, courtroom testimony has revealed.
Details about Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) officers’ surveillance tools and arrest goals in the state have come to light in a federal lawsuit that compelled officers to answer questions under oath, offering a rare window into opaque, internal strategies that are generally kept secret and have been driving mass detentions and chaotic raids.
The class-action suit, filed by Innovation Law Lab, an immigrants’ rights non-profit, challenged ICE’s practice of detaining people without warrants or probable cause. Advocates said the tactic resulted in widespread racial profiling and unconstitutional arrests, and a federal judge sided with the plaintiffs, issuing a ruling broadly halting warrantless arrests in Oregon.
Testimony in a December hearing in the case provided a remarkable acknowledgment by an ICE officer of how daily target arrest numbers played out at the local level, and appeared to contradict the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) officials’ repeated claims that officers didn’t have quotas. Trump adviser Stephen Miller has publicly said the administration’s target was 3,000 daily arrests. The hearing also appeared to be the first time that ICE disclosed in court its use of an app called Elite for operations.
In the hearing, an ICE agent identified as JB testified that his team was given a verbal order to target eight arrests a day.
JB’s team was made up of nine to 12 officers and was tied to the DHS’s so-called “Operation Black Rose”, which launched in Portland last fall and yielded more than 1,200 arrests through mid-December, according to DHS. The target of eight daily arrests a team suggested a potential quota of about 50 daily arrests across Oregon, Innovation Law Lab estimated.
When the plaintiffs’ lawyer asked JB if he complied with the quota, the US attorney objected to the term “quota”, but the judge overruled the objection.
JB replied: “I made as many arrests as I could, as long as it was lawful.”
JB’s testimony centered on a 30 October ICE operation in Woodburn, a city south of Portland and home to many agricultural workers.
JB’s team pulled over a van of farm workers heading to their job early in the morning, smashed the car windows and detained all seven occupants.
JB testified that officers had started the day by surveilling an apartment complex. He suggested officers choose the location in part based on intelligence from an app called Elite. It’s unclear the exact role Elite played in identifying the area as a target – another officer testified that the ICE field office in Portland had provided “intelligence” that led them to visit the site. But JB explained that Elite was a “newer app” given to ICE agents. The app, he said, is “kind of like Google Maps” and shows how many individuals with an “immigration nexus” are believed to be in a certain area. Another officer testified that a “nexus” could mean any history of contact with immigration officials, which could include a naturalized US citizen.
Elite, JB said, helped officers identify areas with a more “dense population”, meaning a higher likelihood of finding people to detain. Another agent described the Woodburn complex as a “target-rich” area. JB said he did not know how Elite “leads” were generated, saying the app “pulls from all kinds of sources”.
JB acknowledged information generated by Elite could be inaccurate: “The app could say 100%, and it’s wrong. The person doesn’t live there. And so it’s not accurate. It’s a tool that we use that gives you probability, but there’s … no such thing as 100%.” Officers have to do “checks” on the intelligence, he said.
At the apartment complex, officers ran license plates of vehicles and became interested in the van when a search in their databases suggested the van’s owner was possibly an immigrant in the US without authorization.
JB said the team decided to follow the van once it departed, even though officers didn’t confirm whether the driver of the van was, in fact, the registered owner of the vehicle. JB found it suspicious that the driver was making multiple stops for passengers, saying: “You don’t know if it’s human trafficking or smuggling.” The fact that the occupants were “only speaking Spanish” during the stop seemed to “confirm” there was smuggling or “harboring people that are not supposed to be here in the United States”, JB said.
ICE’s written report about the arrest, however, made no reference to JB’s concerns about potential trafficking or smuggling. When the plaintiff’s attorney asked JB about this discrepancy, he responded that one of the occupants had suggested they were “all going to work and they’re all from Mexico, so that kind of cancels out human trafficking”.
Elite wasn’t the only app ICE used during the operation. Another ICE agent testified that while carrying out the arrests, he photographed a farm worker in the car known as MJMA, who is the lead plaintiff in the case. The agent ran MJMA’s face through Mobile Fortify, DHS’s facial recognition app. The app showed a match, but the officer testified: “I wasn’t sure if it was her or not.”
MJMA had entered the US with a valid temporary visa last year. Still, JB’s team wrote in their arrest records – inaccurately – that the farm worker entered the US unlawfully. The report also inaccurately described the stop of the van as “consensual”, the judge noted. MJMA was taken to a detention center in Washington state before ICE released her “without explanation and left her to find her own way back home to Oregon”.
The US judge Mustafa Kasubhai sharply criticized ICE’s tactics in Woodburn, noting Elite could surface inaccurate information and lead to targeting of people lawfully in the US. He also said JB’s claims of human smuggling were “unfounded” and “inappropriate” and that ICE targeted the area simply because many farm workers lived there.
The arrested farm workers were among at least 35 people detained by ICE that day in the Woodburn area, the judge noted, writing: “To serve the president’s demands for 3,000 immigration arrests each day nationally, evidence shows that ICE officers deployed to Oregon communities and arrested an ‘extraordinary’ number of Oregonians in October of 2025 with little regard for conducting lawful arrests.”
‘High-value targets’
Many details about Elite’s functions and use by ICE remain unclear, but 404 Media, a tech news site, reported in January that the app was built by Palantir, the data analytics firm that has contracts with the DHS and the Department of Defense.
Internal ICE materials reviewed by 404 Media suggested Elite populated a map with potential deportation targets, generated dossiers on individuals and provided a “confidence score” on the person’s address, the site reported. Citing a user guide, 404 Media said Elite was an acronym for “Enhanced Leads Identification & Targeting for Enforcement” and the tool identified “high-value targets” and had a “geospatial lead sourcing tab” to map targets.
Palantir did not respond to inquiries about Elite and its use in Oregon. The company has described itself as a “data processor” and said it does not play an active role in any of its customers’ data collection efforts or what clients do with that information. DHS and Department of Justice spokespeople did not respond to detailed questions about Elite, arrest quotas and the Oregon lawsuit.
Stephen Manning, Innovation Law Lab’s executive director, said the testimony in the class-action suit illustrated how officers’ drive to meet arrest targets could lead them to potentially violate people’s rights and ignore protections against being detained: “The law is an impediment to the quotas.”
He cited ICE’s violent arrest of Juanita Avila, a legal permanent resident and longtime Oregonian, as an example of how quotas can drive racial profiling. Avila, who filed a declaration in the lawsuit, was pulled over in November and tackled to the ground, even though she had her green card in her pocket. She recently spoke to the Guardian about the ordeal.
Manning said: “She was just in her van. Why stop her other than she is a person of color?”
Manning said ICE was using Elite to create an “electronic dragnet” that aimed to bypass the fourth amendment, the constitutional protection against unreasonable searches.
Nelly Garcia Orjuela, a staff attorney with Innovation Law Lab, said the testimony about Elite revealed “another level of surveillance and how much information [ICE] has at their fingertips”. Officers are not just using that intelligence to target people with serious criminal records, as DHS has claimed is its priority, she said. Instead, she said: “The choices they are making is to go around the law … and target communities that are the most vulnerable.”
