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Roughly 100 activists assembled outside Palantir Technologies’ former global headquarters in Palo Alto on Tuesday to criticize the company’s contracts with Immigration and Customs Enforcement and the Israeli Defense Ministry, and what they consider are the harmful effects of the company’s work.
Occupying all four street corners at the intersection of Hamilton Avenue and Alma Street on Tuesday, demonstrators donned signs that read: “ICE runs on Palantir,” “What connects ICE with Palestine ??? Palantir,” and “Palantir has your data.”
Held on the one-year mark of Trump’s second term, Tuesday’s demonstration was aimed to “get somebody who’s driving by to learn more about Palantir,” and Peter Thiel, and “realize what a threat he is to this grand experiment in democracy,” Scott Herscher, an organizer with The Wolves, a Menlo Park progressive group, said.
Herscher also hoped to “draw attention to a guy who doesn’t like attention,” in reference to Thiel.
Now a billionaire investor and Trump adviser, Thiel cofounded Palantir in 2003. The company aggregates and analyzes data that aids governments in defense, intelligence and law enforcement.
Characterized as an “AI-powered kill chain” on Palantir’s website, Gotham is a data ingestion and integration software that detects patterns using devices such as drones and virtual reality headsets.
Aside from the almost $800 million contract the U.S. Department of Defense awarded Palantir in May, the company has received more than $100 million in federal government spending since Trump took office for his second term, according to The New York Times.
In 2020, Palantir’s Palo Alto home was relegated to just another office for the company, a nondescript brick building at 100 Hamilton Ave., straddled between Philz Coffee and Patagonia.
A 34-year-old Redwood City resident and protester, Meredith Carr, said on Tuesday that she’s known for years that Palantir is problematic, but not that the company had a base so close to her home.
Another resister, Lucinda Lenicheck, who was invited by friends at her church to attend the rally, said she had just finished reading a zine at the event highlighting the “human suffering” Palantir and its founders are allegedly fueling.
“I am horrified, I had no idea,” the 77-year-old said. “I’m so offended that Palantir is in Palo Alto.”
One vice president at a local biotech company, Allison Ryan, was supposed to be working that day. However, the escalation of immigration enforcement in Minneapolis loaded the 44-year-old with enough “rage” and “desperation” to demonstrate.
“Being from Minnesota makes it personal, being a woman makes it personal, being Jewish makes it personal, being a scientist makes it personal,” Ryan said. “There’s a million reasons to feel personally under attack by my own government.”
Civil unrest has cascaded across the country ever since Renee Nicole Good, a 37-year-old mother, was fatally shot by an immigration officer in Minneapolis Jan. 7. Silicon Valley has not been shy to respond to a handful of protests that have erupted across the Peninsula in the weeks that followed.
One speaker at Tuesday’s rally, Cara Silver of Indivisible Palo Alto Plus, pointed to how Good was a U.S. citizen who was “simply observing what was happening” and was “murderder[ed]… without any recourse.”
Others contended that Palantir was complicit in much of the national and global violence of today. Palantir could not be reached for comment as of press time.
Pomaikai Neil, a member of the labor union California Nurses Association, pointed out how some hospitals are using Palantir software to analyze patient data, the same company that’s contributed to ICE raids and the war in Gaza.
The founder of Indivisible Palo Alto Plus, Melissa Dinwiddie, said that what is happening [in Minneapolis] is not isolated.
“Palantir thinks they can quietly profit from pain,” Dinwiddie said, rallying the crowd to refuse to “let suffering be hidden behind algorithms.”
Mobilizers called on protest attendees to demand that cities, universities and companies cancel contracts with Palantir — just as a letter, published Tuesday and signed by more than 200 workers at major tech companies, requested that CEOs “pick up the phone” and urge Trump to get ICE out of U.S. cities, like was done in the San Francisco Bay Area in October.
Another opportunity organizers offered was to support rapid-response networks for ICE victims, like Faith in Action Bay Area for San Mateo County and Amigos de Guadalupe for Santa Clara County, which verify reports of immigration agent sightings, help with immigration-related litigation and other services.
