WASHINGTON — A months-long audit of the enforcement database at the heart of U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement found Wednesday that roughly 38% of its records are restaurant recommendations, many of them detailed, several of them moving, and nearly all of them written by agents who were supposed to be watching the door.
"We expected surveillance," said Dr. Renata Oyelaran, lead analyst at the nonpartisan Institute for Database Hygiene, which reviewed a sample of 4.2 million records. "We did not expect 1.6 million of them to end with 'get the horchata.'"
The records sit inside ImmigrationOS, the platform Palantir Technologies was hired to build under a $30 million contract in April 2025, and which pulls together license plate scans, purchased location data, social media monitoring and case files from across the federal government. According to the audit, the system was designed to give agents a "complete operational picture" of a target's daily life. In practice, the daily lives agents documented most thoroughly were the ones that happened near a griddle.
Analysts traced the pattern to a single text box. Field reports include a free-text section labeled "Additional Observations," meant for vehicle descriptions and known associates. Over time, investigators found, it became the most thoughtfully written part of the federal government. One entry from a 2025 stakeout in Houston reads, in full: "Subject not located. Carnitas transcendent. Salsa verde has a smokiness I cannot explain. Return with family." The entry was flagged for follow-up. Records show the follow-up was lunch.
ImmigrationOS Dining Search
Pick a city and a craving. The system will cross-reference 1.6 million field notes and return the agency's top-rated spots, plus each one's current status.
Restaurant names are invented. Ratings reflect the opinions of individual agents and not the official position of the Department of Homeland Security, which has not eaten there. Status updates are automatic.
The audit found that the reviews are not only plentiful but unusually rigorous. Because the database merges any two records that share an address, its entity-resolution engine has fused hundreds of restaurants with the people who work in them. A taqueria on Houston's east side now has its own alien registration number, a known-associates graph and a five-star rating for its tripe. A dim sum house in Chicago was assigned a risk score of 94 out of 100, which agents in the comments field interpreted as a Zagat number.
License plate data has been similarly repurposed. Analysts found that agents searching parking lots for target vehicles began logging which lots were full at 1 p.m. on a Tuesday, "a reliable indicator of a good lunch," one note explains. A separate dataset, built from location information the agency bought from commercial brokers, appears to have been used chiefly to answer the question of whether a particular food truck was "still at the car wash or moved to the Home Depot."
"These are lawful observations, lawfully observed," said Brent Kohlmeyer, a Homeland Security assistant director for data integration, who confirmed that the agency's internal name for the restaurant layer is "Operation Second Helping." "Our agents are trained to notice details. If one of those details is a mole negro that tastes like it took three days, that's on the mole negro."
Asked whether the agency had considered simply using a restaurant review website, Kohlmeyer said it had, and rejected the idea. "Those sites let the restaurant respond," he said.
The audit's most detailed section covers May 2025, when federal agents fanned out across Washington restaurants to request employment eligibility forms. The paperwork portion of those visits generated 19 database entries. The lunch portion generated 412, including what Oyelaran's team described as "the most comprehensive survey of the District's half-smokes ever assembled by a federal body," and one agent's 1,100-word note on a pupusa in Columbia Heights that ends, "I understand now why people walk thousands of miles."
Review Or Warrant?
Each snippet below is reproduced from the audit's appendix. Decide whether it is a restaurant review or an enforcement note. Auditors were given the same test and the same amount of time.
Every entry in this quiz is both. The auditors spent three weeks trying to build a version where it wasn't, and then went to lunch.
Then there is the problem the auditors call "the ratings curse." Cross-referencing the reviews with the agency's own case files, Oyelaran's team found that a restaurant's chances of receiving an enforcement visit rose sharply within 90 days of an agent awarding it five stars. The better the food, the shorter the wait. "The system finds great cooking the way a bloodhound finds a scent," Oyelaran said. "Then it detains the scent."
As a result, the database's top-rated restaurants are also its most frequently closed. Of the 50 highest-scoring entries nationwide, the audit found, 31 now carry the status "permanently closed," 9 are "under new management" and 6 are a vape shop. In dozens of cases, the same agent who wrote a glowing review later filed a second note lamenting the decline. "Went back. Not the same," reads one from Los Angeles. "New guy doesn't toast the tortillas. Whatever happened to Hector?" The file on Hector is in the system. The agent has not looked at it.
Auditors also reopened the "GREENLAND – MISC" folder, first reported in these pages in January to hold 47,000 files, most of them empty. Its one restaurant entry, a Denny's in Green Bay, Wisconsin, was apparently filed there on the strength of the first five letters. It has been downgraded from four stars to two. "Grand Slam was fine," the note reads. "Not worth the flight."
Food writers have since filed more than 2,300 public records requests for the reviews. All have been returned redacted except the dessert sections, which the agency released in full, citing "public interest in the tres leches."
Agency officials said they had no plans to stop the practice and noted that agents who write reviews show measurably higher morale. Several said they had come to love the restaurants they surveil, and the families who run them, in the way only someone with their home address can.
At press time, the database had issued a new top recommendation, a family-run birria spot in Aurora, Illinois. A team was dispatched to confirm the rating.
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