For years, Alex Karp, Palantir’s CEO, had declared the data-management company to be “involved in supporting progressive values,” saying he has repeatedly “walked away” from contracts that targeted minorities or that he found otherwise unethical. Even as Palantir took on extensive data-management contracts for the federal government, the company said it was not willing to allow its powerful tools to broadly track immigrants across America.
That commitment no longer holds. Palantir’s software is helping U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement track undocumented immigrants and deport them faster, according to federal procurement filings and interviews with people who have knowledge of the project and who spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss sensitive details. The software, Immigration OS, plays a key role in supporting the Trump administration’s mass deportation agenda.
Karp, formerly an outspoken Democrat who a decade ago said that he respected “nothing” about Donald Trump and that a deportation drive made “no sense,” has staunchly defended the president’s immigration policies. Declaring Palantir to be “completely anti-woke,” he has repeatedly praised Trump’s ongoing crackdown on immigrants, thrusting the company into one of the country’s most contentious issues.
That shift in political alliances in no way signals a change in his core beliefs, Karp said in a statement to The Washington Post, portraying his commitment to controlling immigration as of a piece with his long-standing devotion to social justice.
“For over two decades, I have implored our political elite to take seriously the truly progressive position on immigration: one of extreme skepticism. To no avail,” Karp said. “Unfettered immigration in Europe, where I lived for well over a decade, has been a disaster — depressing wages for the working class and resulting in mass social dislocation. I remain an economic progressive, isolated among self-proclaimed progressives that are anything but.”
The changes at Palantir have been driven by multiple factors, according to five of the people familiar with the company’s project. Palantir executives saw Trump’s election to a second term as a mandate from voters for stricter border control, the people said, and, like many other companies, Palantir has changed some policies in response to executive orders targeting diversity in hiring and other issues. They added that Karp’s support of Israel after the Oct. 7, 2023, Hamas attack has drawn him closer to Republican national security hawks.
Palantir’s federal contracting business has bloomed during the Trump administration. Its September tally of new federal contracts was $128 million, its largest monthly sum on record, according to USASpending.gov. The company’s stock price is up more than 120 percent this year, as it rides its contracting wave and the boom in companies that, like Palantir, are centered on the development and use of AI.
Palantir has long defied simple political characterization. For years, it has worked with administrations of both parties on projects other Silicon Valley firms shunned, such as the Pentagon’s Project Maven AI target identification system. But its support for ICE on a deportation crackdown punctuated by violent clashes and stiff court challenges has sparked debate among current and former employees over whether it runs afoul of the company’s values and endangers its bipartisan profile.
Seven months into the project, which was renewed in late September, some Palantir employees still harbor concerns about Immigration OS, according to two of the people familiar with the matter. They say some Palantir staff members have been discussing whether the contract should be discontinued if ICE’s use of the technology veers into extrajudicial actions or violate the company’s civil liberties principles. It couldn’t be determined whether the company’s senior executives are involved in those discussions. A Palantir spokeswoman declined to comment.
ICE and its parent department, the Department of Homeland Security, declined to answer questions about Immigration OS. DHS said in a statement that Palantir has been a contractor for 14 years, providing “solutions for investigative case management and enforcement operations” to ICE. “DHS looks holistically at technology and data solutions that can meet operational and mission demands,” it said.
ICE awarded Palantir a $30 million contract on April 11 to build an “Immigration Lifecycle Operating System,” or Immigration OS for short. Its aim, according to procurement filings by the agency, is to facilitate the “selection and apprehension operations of illegal aliens” based on ICE priorities, minimize “time and resource expenditure” in deportations, and track in “near real-time” which individuals leave the country voluntarily. Palantir won the contract without a competitive bidding process, with ICE citing an “urgent and compelling need” and stating that “Palantir is the only source that can provide the required capabilities … without causing unacceptable delays.” ICE renewed the contract on Sept. 25, bringing its total value to about $60 million — a relatively small amount in the context of Palantir’s$2.87 billion revenue in 2024.
In an internal communication to employees in the spring, Palantir presented the project as a “prototype” and said “longer-term engagements” were “TBD,” according to a copy obtained by 404 Media. The company said it was “pursuing this effort because we believe it is critical to national security and that our software can make a meaningful difference in the safety of all involved in enforcement actions.”
ICE and Palantir have declined to disclose how many people the system tracks, which agencies it pulls data from, and whether there are safeguards against mistaken identity or overcollection of surveillance data. Shyam Sankar, Palantir’s chief technology officer, told the New York Times in a recent interview that Immigration OS tracked encounters at the border, asylum applications and applications for benefits. Immigration OS does not track information of U.S. citizens who are relatives of undocumented immigrants, Palantir said in a statement.
ICE adopted Immigration OS this year as it rolled out a campaign to identify and detain what it calls the “Worst of the Worst.” The agency has cited cases of undocumented immigrants committing serious crimes as justification for broad deportation sweeps through Chicago, Charlotte and Portland, Oregon, and other cities. ICE and Palantir declined to say whether Immigration OS played a role in helping compile ICE’s “Worst of the Worst” lists.
Trump said on Thanksgiving Day that he would “permanently pause” migration from “Third World Countries,” broadly deport undocumented immigrants, and end all federal benefits and subsidies to noncitizens. That would mark an escalation of a campaign that federal judges have repeatedly ruled exceeds the administration’s legal authority, with one Chicago judge saying last month that the use of force involved “shocks the conscience.” The Department of Homeland Security has decried the rulings as coming from “activist judges” and said its actions have been lawful.
In an interview with Wired published in November, Karp said he had previously “pulled things” that he believed were being deployed in violation of the company’s code of conduct, while rejecting contentions that its immigration software is. Asked whether he needed to take a closer look at how Palantir’s products were being used in the United States, he called it “exactly the right question,” adding: “I’m telling you that I have done this, and I will continue to do it.”
Wendy R. Anderson, who was Palantir’s senior vice president for national security until May, said Karp has never wavered in his conviction that tech companies working in defense have a duty to the country, not to politics.
“Alex starts from a single, nonnegotiable premise: America has to win,” she said, speaking generally and not in reference to Immigration OS. “Not in a partisan sense, but in the enduring one — the survival of the United States and the Western institutions that make free societies possible.”
Palantir, founded by Karp and PayPal co-founder Peter Thiel in 2003 in the wake of 9/11, has long drawn criticism from civil rights activists over the powerful data-management tools it sold to the likes of the Pentagon, CIA and ICE.
Karp is the son of a Jewish father and African American mother, who brought him along to civil rights protests as a child. He grew up in Philadelphia, graduated from Central High School in 1985 and earned a bachelor’s degree in philosophy from Haverford College. Karp has long been outspoken in his self-identification as a Democrat and his beliefs in privacy protections. “We as a company, and I as an individual, always have been deeply involved in supporting progressive values and causes,” Karp said in 2011.
In summer 2015, shortly after Trump announced his first major presidential run, Karp told his staff that he had turned down an opportunity to meet Trump, as “it would be hard to make up someone I find less appealing,” according to a leaked video published by BuzzFeed. Karp said he opposed Trump’s broad deportation platform, saying it made “no sense” to throw out hardworking people. He said blaming immigrants for the nation’s ills would bring up “the worst that a society can bring up.”
During Trump’s first presidency, Palantir said it would not work directly with ICE’s Enforcement and Removal Operations arm on deportations, citing the risk of human rights violations. The company limited its contracts to the agency’s Homeland Security Investigations division, which worked on issues such as terrorism, sex trafficking and drug smuggling, though in practice there was at least some crossover with raids on undocumented immigrants.
Palantir had made that distinction, Courtney Bowman, the company’s director of privacy and civil liberties, wrote in a 2020 letter to Amnesty International, “because we share your organization’s concern with the potential serious human rights violations against migrants, refugees, and asylum seekers at the U.S.-Mexico border and risks of disproportionate immigration enforcement inside the U.S.”
Critics say Immigration OS represents a breach of those principles. The project has drawn public backlash, including from Y Combinator co-founder Paul Graham, who wrote on X that Palantir was “building the infrastructure of the police state.” In a public letter, 13 of the company’s former employees accused Palantir’s leadership of being “complicit” in “normalizing authoritarianism” in America.
Within Palantir, executives defended the project by citing changing voter sentiment on the border issue and changes to ICE’s structure. In one of his first executive orders in January, Trump had ordered ICE’s Homeland Security Investigations to prioritize immigration enforcement instead of national security.
“The national conversation around immigration enforcement, both at the border and in the interior of the United States has shifted,” the company wrote in an internal communication to employees, according to a copy obtained by 404 Media. Palantir said it had realized that “to really support the agency’s immigration enforcement mission, we must expand our aperture … this means supporting workflows that are substantially distinct from our historical scope and into Enforcement and Removal Operations (ERO).”
The policy reversal prompted some employee resignations. Brianna Katherine Martin, who had been a U.S. government strategist for the company for almost three years, left in May, citing the recent expansion of the company’s work with ICE.
“For most of my time here, I found the way that Palantir grappled with the weight of our capabilities to be refreshing, transparent, and conscionable,” Martin wrote on LinkedIn. “This has changed for me over the past few months.” She did not respond to requests for comment.
The deepened partnership with ICE has come amid other changes at the company.
Palantir revised its employee code of conduct in March, removing pledges to avoid biased decision-making and eschew unfair action based on race or national origin. The “Protect the Vulnerable” section of the code previously said: “We will not create or perpetuate the unfair treatment and/or stigmatization of individuals or groups, particularly when such unfair action is based on race, color, national origin, religion, sex, gender identity, disability, age, ancestry, marital status, citizenship, or sexual orientation.” The new version pledges more generally to avoid unfair action “based on any characteristic protected by federal, state, or local laws.”
Palantir also deleted a section that said employees should strive to overcome conscious and unconscious biases in their decision-making. The section now says employees should engage with one another with respect.
The code-of-conduct changes were made in response to Trump executive orders unrelated to the company’s ICE business, according to a person familiar with the matter, who spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss the shift. Trump had forbidden federal contractors from “illegal” diversity practices in January.
Karp biographer Michael Steinberger, whose book “The Philosopher in the Valley” was published last month, said his interviews revealed Karp’s increasing exasperation with what he saw as the Democratic Party’s unwillingness to control the border and preoccupation with identity politics.
“He has definitely moved to the right,” Steinberger said. “Though I suspect he would be more inclined to say that he thinks the left left him.”
An important factor in Karp’s rightward shift has been the Oct. 7 attack on Israel two years ago, Steinberger wrote in his book. “I’m now very willing to overlook my disagreements with Republicans on other issues because of the position they have taken on this one,” he quotes Karp there as saying.
In a letter in July to Amnesty International, responding to questions about its ICE contracts, Palantir said that while it took the human rights risks of its work with governments seriously, its role was to serve as a responsible federal contractor and uphold the law, not to set U.S. government policy.
“Palantir is not an oversight authority entrusted with scrutinizing or questioning executive branch actors,” the company wrote.
