Palantir Technologies
The Enforcement Infrastructure
Embedded Files
Palantir built the tool ICE uses to raid homes before dawn. It built the system that turns a doctor's office visit into a targeting data point. It has employees inside the administration overseeing the very contracts it fulfills. In April 2026, its CEO published a 22-point manifesto rejecting pluralism. This is not a defense contractor with controversial clients. It is an active participant in the authoritarian project.
What Palantir Is
Palantir Technologies is a data analytics company founded in 2003 with CIA seed funding from In-Q-Tel, the agency's venture capital arm. Built In Its software combines data from disparate sources — government databases, medical records, utility bills, phone records, social media — into unified analytical environments used for surveillance, targeting, and enforcement.
The company's name is intentional. A palantir is the all-seeing stone from Tolkien's The Lord of the Rings. The company sees this as aspirational.
Its current flagship government products are Gotham, used by intelligence and defense agencies; ELITE, the ICE enforcement targeting tool; and ImmigrationOS, the Immigration Lifecycle Operating System awarded a $30 million sole-source contract in April 2025. Axios
The Ideological Foundation
Palantir was not built as a neutral technology company. Its founding patron, Peter Thiel, published a foundational essay in 2009 that must be read as a political program — read it here:
"I no longer believe that freedom and democracy are compatible." — Peter Thiel, Cato Unbound, April 13, 2009
Thiel subsequently funded Curtis Yarvin, the blogger who has argued since 2007 that democracy is democracy's fatal flaw — that civilization needs a sovereign corporation, a CEO instead of a president, code instead of law. Government by algorithm, unelected, unaccountable, permanent.
Thiel bankrolled JD Vance's Senate campaign. Vance cited Yarvin by name in 2021. When they took the White House, Yarvin attended the inauguration's Coronation Ball at the Watergate Hotel as an honored guest.
Dwight Eisenhower warned in his 1961 farewell address: "Public policy could itself become the captive of a scientific-technological elite." Sixty-four years later, Joe Biden used his own farewell address to name the same threat: a tech-industrial complex that could pose real dangers to the country.
The company Thiel built is now inside the government it was always designed to replace.
The ELITE Tool — How It Works
Based on the user guide obtained and published by 404 Media in January 2026 — ELITE: The Palantir App ICE Uses to Find Neighborhoods to Raid and the full user guide — Palantir's ELITE tool:
Pulls Medicaid records, utility bills, address history, driver's license data, and courthouse appearances from across government databases
Stitches them into a file the subject will never see
Assigns each home address a confidence score — a number measuring how certain the algorithm is that the person is still there
When a person updates their address at a doctor's office, the score updates. Seeking medical care feeds the file.
ICE agents open the app, draw shapes on a map around neighborhoods with the highest scores, and call them target-rich areas
They move before dawn
At 5:40 on a Tuesday morning in January, agents used the app to approach a door. The address had been updated at a clinic six weeks before — routine care, a new address on a form. The confidence score was current. A daughter was inside. The system had worked exactly as designed.
The Medicaid Data Pipeline
In January 2026, 404 Media obtained and published a data-sharing agreement between ICE and the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services covering the records of nearly 80 million Medicaid patients. This data feeds directly into Palantir's analytical systems. 404 Media
The implications are direct: seeking medical care, updating an address at a clinic, filing for disability benefits — each of these routine acts of daily life now generates data that can be used to locate and target individuals for enforcement.
Inside the Administration
Multiple former Palantir employees hold positions inside the Trump administration, including within DOGE, which has hired a number of Palantir alumni to assist in restructuring federal agencies. NPR At least ten members of the Trump administration own Palantir stock. POGO
Among the most significant conflicts: Stephen Miller — the primary architect of U.S. immigration enforcement — owns between $100,000 and $250,000 in Palantir stock held in a brokerage account in one of his young children's names. The Office of Government Ethics is clear that assets owned by a minor child are analyzed under the criminal conflict of interest law as if the employee owns them directly. Miller oversees the very enforcement programs Palantir's tools execute.POGO
The Manifesto — April 2026
On April 19-20, 2026, Palantir published a 22-point manifesto on X.com, condensed from CEO Alex Karp's book The Technological Republic: Hard Power, Soft Belief, and the Future of the West. The post accumulated 32 million views within days. Fortune
The manifesto's closing three points drew the most alarm:
Point 20: The pervasive intolerance of religious belief in certain circles must be resisted.
Point 21: Some cultures have produced vital advances; others remain dysfunctional and regressive... certain cultures and indeed subcultures have proven middling, and worse, regressive and harmful.
Point 22: We must resist the shallow temptation of a vacant and hollow pluralism... inclusion into what?
Dave Karpf, associate professor at the George Washington University School of Media and Public Affairs, wrote: "There is nothing in this America First-sounding manifesto that would not fit comfortably within a modern-day Mussolini regime." Al Jazeera and multiple international outlets used the term technofascism to describe its positions. TechPolicy.Press Al Jazeera
The manifesto prompted more than 200,000 people in the United Kingdom to petition the government to break contracts with Palantir, with members of Parliament comparing it to the "ramblings of a supervillain." Democracy Now!
What Can Be Done ✅
Check your investments. Palantir (PLTR) is widely held in index funds and ETFs including retirement accounts. Contact your fund administrator and demand disclosure of Palantir holdings.
Apply congressional pressure. Contact your Representatives and Senators demanding hearings on the ImmigrationOS contract and the Medicaid data-sharing agreement. Demand that DHS and ICE appropriations be conditioned on civil liberties compliance and independent oversight of contractor tools.
Support organizations actively fighting back:
ACLU — challenging Palantir's immigration enforcement tools in court
Amnesty International — documenting civil liberties impacts of ImmigrationOS
No Tech for ICE — pressuring Palantir to end ICE contracts
Electronic Frontier Foundation — digital rights advocacy and surveillance documentation
404 Media — independent investigative journalism on Palantir's government contracts
Raise awareness. Most Americans cannot identify Palantir by name. When officials defend ICE enforcement, ask which technology company built the tool and who profits.
Documents in this library: 📄 Palantir Technologies — Corporate Profile & Threat Assessment
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