Last week Palantir Technologies, the controversial data-mining firm at the center of ICE’s mass-deportation campaign, announced it would leave Denver and move its headquarters to Miami.
This came days after two members of Congress — Rep. Jason Crow and Sen. John Hickenlooper — announced they will donate tens of thousands of dollars to immigrant rights organizations to offset campaign contributions they received from Palantir’s executives and employees.
More members of Congress are likely to follow suit and return their donations as the company and its political contributions come under more public scrutiny. These donations, while welcome, raise a deeper and more troubling question: Why is a company that powers mass surveillance and immigrant enforcement so deeply embedded in our political system in the first place?
Even before ICE agents killed Renee Good and Alex Pretti in Minneapolis, the Department of Homeland Security’s enforcement arm racked up a long history of racism, violence, and anticonstitutional activity. What’s really changed since its founding in 2003 is the speed and the scale of that violence — in the last four months, ICE agents have shot nine people and killed three.
Now armed with unchecked power from this administration and a growing suite of surveillance tech tools, ICE has a blank check to terrorize all of us. But what few are talking about is how these two pieces of the puzzle are connected: ICE is a financial conduit between the federal government and the tech industry, namely the data-mining firm Palantir. Silicon Valley executives and Capitol Hill suits are getting rich and doing each other favors while a band of thugs threatens our communities and our democracy.
Tech has been a big part of ICE’s deportation pipeline for a while now. In 2018, through my work at Mijente with the #NoTechForICE campaign, we put out detailed documents to track those connections. But as the DHS’s budget has grown under the Trump administration, so have the lucrative tech and data contracts that extend ICE’s reach.
Palantir now makes billions from government contracts for software and services. Last year, the federal government paid Palantir $30 million to build its new AI-driven surveillance platform, “ImmigrationOS,” now foundational to ICE’s functioning. When agents charge into neighborhoods and workplaces, they are relying on Palantir’s custom software to run their operations and using data brokers to get their information.
When the mood in Silicon Valley was decidedly more liberal, Palantir leadership — which includes co-founder Peter Thiel and CEO Alex Karp — mainly stayed under the public radar. But in this new political era where retaliation from the president and abuse of force are seen as “high testosterone” behavior, they are now saying the quiet part out loud — very loud.
In a 2025 earnings call, Palantir CEO Alex Karp said that “when you have an open border, it means that the average poor American earns less” and that he believes “this country is right to stop that.”
He went on to say that he was proud of the efforts Palantir is involved in around immigration, and most Palantirians are proud too. He may be right: co-founder Joe Lonsdale has posted on X about his support for the government’s actions in Venezuela, and wrote that Palantir was founded to “save Western Civilization from our adversaries, especially communists and Islamists.”
When some Palantir employees asked questions internally about how their software was supporting ICE’s recent killing of ICU nurse Alex Pretti, the “global director of privacy and civil liberties engineering” simply sent out a link to information about existing government contracts.
And it’s more than just talk. Karp and other Palantirians are showing pride in the administration’s work through their wallets. As they pocket billion dollar government tech contracts, they’re giving away million dollar political donations.
And the largest recipient of donations from Palantir employees and the company’s PAC are PAC’s set up to support Trump, according to OpenSecrets. All you have to do to is follow the money.
That’s why last month, we released The Palantir Payroll: a deeply-researched list of the political donations from Palantir’s corporate PAC, and individual Palantir employees and executives. The data was compiled from public filings with the Federal Elections Commission, looking at Palantir’s employees and executives donations to politicians’ principal campaign committees, their leadership committees, and the super PACs that support them. Scroll through the spreadsheet and see just how far and wide the money flows — and whether your representatives are accepting money from the company that ICE depends on.
Palantir uses public money to build private control — and private money to try and buy public control. Now that the company’s technologies are threatening the liberties of everyone, we all must ask ourselves: What are we going to do about it?
Fortunately, there’s one simple thing you can do today to make a difference. Don’t vote for any politician who takes money from Palantir and therefore supports ICE. If a leader you like has already accepted a donation from the company, demand that they return the funds. Spread the word among your friends and family, coworkers and neighbors.
No tech for ICE and no political donations from Palantir
Jacinta Gonzalez is the head of programs at MediaJustice, a national organization that fights corporate and government control of media and technology in Black, brown, and working class communities. She previously served as the policy director at Mijente, where she helped lead the #NoTechForICE campaign exposing tech companies contracts with immigration enforcement.
Sign up for Sound Off to get a weekly roundup of our columns, editorials and more.
To send a letter to the editor about this article, submit online or check out our guidelines for how to submit by email or mail.