In These Times (06/04/2025)

05/04/2026

Palantir has solid reasons to undertake a recruitment spree. Though critics gloated when its stocks briefly plummeted after the Trump administration’s tariff announcements, they have since surged to three times their value at the time of November’s presidential election. And the company’s knack for cultivating high-level connections among national security personnel has netted a bonanza of government contracts related to President Donald Trump’s accelerating authoritarianism.

Already, Palantir has partnered with Elon Musk’s SpaceX and the AI and robotics contractor Anduril to begin building Trump’s ​“Golden Dome” — a U.S. version of Israel’s Iron Dome air defense system. It’s also working with Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency to create an application programming interface that will allow Homeland Security to comb through IRS data to find undocumented taxpayers to deport.

In April, Palantir, which has long enjoyed partnerships with military, police and border enforcement, won a $29.8 million contract with ICE to enhance its dystopian ​“Immigration Lifecycle Operating System,” providing granular information about immigrants the government seeks to monitor, detain and expel. And the company is set to overhaul ICE’s Investigative Case Management system to better track target ​“populations” across hundreds of data categories, from eye color and tattoos to employment address and Social Security number. Some former employees, alarmed at the company’s work advancing Trump’s repressive agenda, recently published an open letter, ​“The Scouring of the Shire,” warning that Palantir — and Big Tech more broadly — is ​“normalizing authoritarianism under the guise of a ​‘revolution’ led by oligarchs.”