Palantir happily helped Trump’s deportation push—and screwed itself

Palantir, the big dumb Big Tech company named after the crystal ball in “Lord of the Rings,” just dropped a Securities and Exchange Commission filing—which would be hilarious if we lived in a different timeline, one where Big Tech companies hadn’t thoroughly abased themselves in service to President Donald Trump’s worst impulses. 

You see, Palantir needs the SEC and investors to know that it may not be able to recruit, hire, or retain talent if immigration regulations and restrictions tighten or if visa caps are imposed.

Isn’t it nice to see a big company sticking up for immigrants like this?

Oh, wait. 

Much of Palantir’s work is, of course, leveraging, synergizing, right-sizing, monetizing, and operationalizing government data that makes it easier to brutalize and deport immigrants. 

Yes, the company that has recently taken $81 million of your tax dollars to help Immigration and Customs Enforcement turn the country into a terrifying nightmare for immigrants and anyone who supports them needs to be able to hire immigrants to better terrify immigrants. 

All of this is distressing, but not particularly surprising. 

Palantir was founded by Peter Thiel, who, though himself an immigrant, is deeply, spectacularly racist. Palantir is currently run by Alex Karp, who views the Trump team’s penchant for bombing fishing boats in the Caribbean as a growth opportunity.

Make no mistake: Karp is also deeply, spectacularly racist, yammering on about how “unfettered immigration” in Europe is a disaster and causes “mass social dislocation.” 

Palantir’s role in mass deportations is not an attenuated one. It’s not providing some small, otherwise innocuous widget. 

Rather, it’s the standard-bearers for anti-immigrant technology. How else would you describe the company that has developed the “ELITE” tool, which ICE uses to more confidently predict which five-year-olds are the worst of the worst and from which school parking lots to abduct them?

But apparently Palantir decided this was a perfect time for a rousing chorus of “Immigrants (We Get the Job Done)”—but only for its own workforce. The government can’t make it harder for Palantir to hire immigrants because then Palantir won’t be as tip-top efficient at deporting them. 

No word on whether Palantir needs those hypothetical future immigrants to execute its $10 billion contract with the U.S. Army to coordinate software contracts and get “significant cost efficiencies,” which was what the so-called Department of Government Efficiency was supposed to have taken care of. 

There’s also no word on whether those hypothetical future immigrants would also get the privilege of working on “ImmigrationOS,” a twee little name for a mass surveillance tool created to ensure that the government can brutalize at scale and make all of Stephen Miller’s ghoulish deportation dreams come true.

Never fear; Palantir can probably just “donate” tens of millions of dollars to Trump to ensure it gets a pass and can hire immigrants. Well, the right kind of immigrants. 

Perhaps some super-racist Afrikaners, the only people being admitted as refugees these days, could fit the bill? They’ve already got the bigoted white supremacist vibe on lock, so they’re likely totally fine with being immigrants whose entire job is to harm other immigrants. 

It’s a match made in hell.