Photo: Projection Upon Palantir Office by ICE out of Santa Clara County. (ProBonoPhoto.org/Jesse Kornblum). CC-NC-BY-4.0
Palantir Technologies Inc. is an American software company that builds large-scale data integration and analytics platforms for government agencies, military branches, and commercial businesses. Palantir’s technology lies at the heart of the government systems that enable mass surveillance and militarization at home and abroad, and is now moving into healthcare. The profits go to founder Peter Thiel and CEO Alex Karp, tech oligarchs who spend millions to promote a political agenda that favors free-market policies and increasingly supports Republican candidates and Trump-aligned PACs. Protests and public acrimony are growing.
Analysis
Palantir has no direct-to-consumer products yet is more and more impacting our lives through lucrative government contracts with ICE and other surveillance agencies, military contracts with the US and Israel, huge political donations, and now health care. That has brought the company, long the target of protests, under fire from nurses. A nationwide protest organized by National Nurses United took place on August 27 in Los Angeles, Palo Alto, Chicago, Washington, D.C., Portland, Maine, Asheville, Austin and New Orleans.
The union is calling on hospitals, elected officials and the federal government to cut ties with Palantir, an artificial intelligence and data analysis company with massive contracts in government, defense and health care. “No part of the country has been untouched by the terror and violence of ICE and Customs and Border Protection, enabled by Palantir’s technology,” NNU President Jamie Brown said in announcing the protests.
Palantir has been working with U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement for years. The union’s campaign specifically calls out ELITE, short for Enhanced Leads Identification and Targeting for Enforcement, a Palantir product used by ICE. According to the Electronic Frontier Foundation, ELITE can access data from numerous government databases. That includes addresses provided by the Department of Health and Human Services, which oversees Medicaid, information Palantir has enabled ICE to access. Civil-liberties groups and privacy advocates say information collected by health care providers and other public services should not be accessible to the Department of Homeland Security or ICE.
Privacy advocates have had concerns about the company for years. In a statement, the American Civil Liberties Union began following the company in 2011 due to concerns about its predictive policing risk assessment databases. Now, said the ACLU in a statement, Palantir’s “involvement in questionable government uses of mass data has… [led to] Amnesty International calling out the company’s responsibility under United Nations human rights principles to “immediately cease their work” with the Trump deportation program.” According to the ACLU, Palantir isn’t just selling products to the Trump Administration; it is creating custom applications to facilitate Trump’s goals of mass removal, identity checks, and racial profiling.
Similarly, Palantir’s deep involvement in the Israeli war on Palestine has long drawn protests. The Israeli Defense Forces use Palantir’s AI and data analysis tools to facilitate what many call war crimes: the targeting of individuals in Gaza and Lebanon for attacks and assassinations based on data analysis. Palantir CEO Alex Karp has made no secret of his strong support for Israel.
The Nurses’ objections extend beyond immigration enforcement. Palantir has expanded rapidly into health care, where its software is used for nurse scheduling, staffing projections, patient-bed assignments and discharge management. The union is particularly critical of Palantir’s work with HCA Healthcare, the nation’s largest for-profit hospital system.
HCA uses a scheduling system known as Timpani that relies on Palantir’s AI technology to make staffing decisions previously made by local hospital managers. Nurses claim the system can result in inadequate staffing and replace clinical judgment with decisions made by software and distant, centralized administrators. “While nurses have had to witness the fear and desperation of our patients and neighbors facing the threat of immigration raids, we have also seen hospitals start to buckle under conditions of extreme scarcity,” the NNU’s Brown said.
Palantir’s collaborations with ICE, the IDF, and other government surveillance programs are extremely lucrative. The company recently reported a 93% growth in revenue, which reached $1.94 billion, quite a jump from around $1 billion a year ago. In response to the revenue report, the company’s stock skyrocketed.
But the protests are being heard. Representative Seth Moulton (D-Mass) recently rejected a contribution from Palantir’s PAC to his Senate campaign, and New York City Comptroller Mark Levine has expressed alarm about the state’s investments in the company. Levine said that “Recent fatal shootings in Minneapolis, as well as ICE activities more broadly, have drawn nationwide protests and intensified scrutiny of federal enforcement operations and highlighted material reputational and human rights risks to Palantir.” He added that Palantir’s increasing involvement with ICE “represents a material change in the Company’s role in these activities and underscores the potential for elevated enterprise risk with implications for long‑term shareholder value.”
Take Action
Report: ICE Using Palantir Tool That Feeds On Medicaid Data, Josh Richman, Electronic Frontier Foundation, Jan. 15, 2026, https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2026/01/report-ice-using-palantir-tool-feeds-medicaid-data
#PurgePalantir From Politics- The fight against mass surveillance starts locally.
https://purgepalantir.com/take-action/