Six protestors who demonstrated in front of the New York City offices of Palantir Technologies were arrested on Thursday morning. The demonstrators had gathered to bring attention to the controversial firm and the work it does to power the deportation of immigrants from the US.
The protestors stood in front of the Palantir offices on Manhattan’s Avenue of the Americas, linking arms to block entrance into the building and forcing several people attempting to enter to shove past them. At one point, several demonstrators entered the lobby of the building holding up signs that read “Palantir powers ICE”, referring to US Immigration and Customs Enforcement.
The protest was organized by Planet Over Profit, a climate justice group that also organizes against systemic inequality, with support from immigrant rights group Mijente. Police broke up the demonstration after roughly an hour, and the six demonstrators who were arrested and taken to the seventh precinct were released by 11.20am.
Caroline Chouinard, a Brooklyn resident who was arrested at the protest, said that police began to detain and zip-tie them before they could comply with their orders to disperse. Chouinard said several people who identified themselves as Palantir employees also pushed the protestors. Videos shared captured by representatives of Planet Over Profit showed some people attempting to enter the premises pushing the protestors – it is not clear in the footage whether they were employees of Palantir. Chouinard was released with a summons to appear in court on charges of disorderly conduct.
“We met a lot of physical violence during the arrest itself,” Chouinard told the Guardian. “I personally was not planning on being arrested. I was just using my body to physically stand there and myself and others around me were repeatedly shoved and pushed to the ground and were grabbed. Several police officers were really physical and pushing us around.”
Chouinard said they attended the protest because they want to stop Palantir from enabling agencies that are “hurting and disappearing my neighbors”.
“We’re disrupting Palantir’s business as usual because producing AI that makes fascism stronger and more efficient does not belong in NYC,” Chouinard said in a statement. “Palantir is in the business of tracking and surveilling all of us and it’s our responsibility to track them back: they’re in bed with the Trump administration, Ice, IOF [the Israeli Defense Forces] and others. From NYC to LA to Gaza, Palantir is one company making unspeakable horrors happen.”
The company did not immediately respond to a request for comment on the protest.
Palantir, a data-mining firm founded in 2003 by billionaire investor and Donald Trump backer Peter Thiel and now run by CEO Alex Karp, has attracted an increased level of critique and attention as information about new and expanded contracts with various arms of the Department of Homeland Security as well as other federal agencies have been revealed. In April, Palantir was awarded a $30m Ice contract to create a surveillance platform called ImmigrationOS. According to the contract, ImmigrationOS would be developed to “streamline” the identification and arrest of immigrants prioritized for removal; to provide real-time tracking and reporting of self-deportations; and make deportations largely more efficient. This additional $30m is on top of an existing Ice contract Palantir was first awarded under the Obama administration in 2014 and has been renewed several times since. Palantir has also been tapped to help the so-called “department of government efficiency” (Doge) build a “mega API” to access Internal Revenue Service data, according to Wired.
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In a letter sent in mid-June, 10 Democratic lawmakers said that Palantir’s work building a “mega-database” for the Trump administration, which would gather Americans’ personal information from multiple government agencies and centralize it into one repository, as was reported by the New York Times, would violate federal privacy laws.
The company posted a rebuttal to the letter on X: “To be very clear: Palantir is not building a master database, and Palantir is neither conducting nor enabling mass surveillance of American citizens. We do not operate the systems, access the data, or make decisions about its use.”
The protestors did not expect Palantir to answer demands to halt its work with Ice and other arms of the federal government. Their goal, according to Liv Senghor, a lead organizer with Planet Over Profit, was to mobilize “the average American”.
“We want regular people who care about free speech and freedom of privacy to understand how entrenched Palantir is, not only in our government, our military, but in our daily lives,” Senghor told the Guardian after police broke up the protest. “We want to foment enough anger and discontent at Palantir that we get a groundswell of everyday people who they actually have to listen to.”
The organizers of the protest have also planned a protest in front of Palantir’s Palo Alto offices on Thursday afternoon.