Immigration Openness

In January 2026, reporting revealed that ICE was using a Palantir-built tool called ELITE that taps Medicaid data to identify and arrest people for deportation. The tool maps potential targets and provides 'confidence scores' for individuals' current addresses. A data-sharing agreement between ICE and the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services gave ICE access to personal data of nearly 80 million Medicaid patients. The Electronic Frontier Foundation challenged the use of healthcare data for immigration enforcement, arguing patients never consented to their health-related information being repurposed for deportation.

Spotify ran recruitment advertisements for U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement as part of a DHS campaign. Ads reportedly began with language about 'millions of dangerous illegals.' Spotify received $74,000 from DHS for the ads. The company defended the ads as not violating advertising policies. The non-profit Indivisible Project launched a 'Spotify Unwrapped' boycott in response. Spotify stopped running the ads at end of 2025.

Despite years of major Democratic donations including $7M to Harris, Reed Hastings publicly endorsed Trump's executive order establishing a $100,000 fee for H-1B visa applicants. He posted on X: 'I've worked on H1-B politics for 30 years. Trump's $100K per year tax is a great solution.'

In May 2025, thirteen former Palantir employees published a letter condemning the company's work with the Trump administration, weeks after ICE awarded Palantir $30 million for ImmigrationOS. The former workers, including software engineers, managers, and a privacy team member, said the company had violated its own code of conduct stating software should 'protect the vulnerable.' They wrote: 'Early Palantirians understood the ethical weight of building these technologies. These principles have now been violated.'

Paul Graham publicly criticized Palantir Technologies over its $30 million ImmigrationOS contract with ICE, urging programmers not to work for 'the company building the infrastructure of the police state.' He pressed a Palantir executive to commit not to build things that help the government violate the US constitution.

In April 2025, the Chan Zuckerberg Initiative formally ended its funding of FWD.us, the immigration reform advocacy group Zuckerberg co-founded in 2013 with an op-ed calling for comprehensive immigration reform. Well over half of the roughly $400 million donated to FWD.us since its founding came through CZI. By late 2022, CZI had begun pivoting away from social advocacy, and the break was formalized in April 2025. The timing aligned with Zuckerberg's broader rightward political recalibration during the Trump era.

Unlike in 2017 when DoorDash CEO promised free food to lawyers supporting immigrants and refugees, the company has been silent on immigration in Trump's second term. While delivery workers—many of them immigrants—continue doing the actual delivering, DoorDash and other delivery companies are offering no immigration help or legal support, despite earlier commitments.

Palantir's Investigative Case Management (ICM) system, also known as ImmigrationOS, is used by ICE for immigration enforcement operations. The contract has been expanded under the Trump administration's mass deportation agenda. Civil rights groups have criticized Palantir for enabling family separations and deportations.

AWS serves as the primary cloud infrastructure for DHS and ICE, hosting the Palantir-designed Investigative Case Management system used for deportation targeting, biometric data for 230 million individuals, and at least 62% of CBP's systems. Palantir pays AWS approximately $600,000/month. Employee protests dating to 2018 have called for ending ICE contracts.

Between 2008 and April 2025, Immigration and Customs Enforcement awarded Cellebrite at least 213 contracts worth over $48.6 million for UFED phone extraction technology. A new $11 million contract was signed in 2025. CBP uses Cellebrite to perform warrantless searches at the border. The ACLU filed suit in 2017 claiming searches violated First and Fourth Amendment rights.

In 2024-2025, Alex Karp dramatically shifted his rhetoric on immigration, claiming that 'the truly progressive position on immigration is extreme skepticism.' He defended Palantir's expanded ICE work under Trump's second term, including the $30M ImmigrationOS contract, saying the 2024 election signaled Americans 'wanted to keep the demographics of the country the same way.'

In December 2024, Alex Karp wrote a $1 million check to the Trump-Vance Inaugural Committee, marking a dramatic shift from his previous support of Biden and Harris. This followed his 'political metamorphosis' catalyzed by the October 7, 2023 attacks in Israel. Karp cited Democratic positions on immigration, Iran, and antisemitism as reasons for his shift.

In December 2024, Alex Karp donated $1 million to MAGA Inc., a super PAC supporting Donald Trump. This was his largest disclosed political gift by an order of magnitude, coming alongside his $1M inaugural donation. The donation represented a complete reversal from his August 2024 statement that he was 'voting against Trump.'

ASML CEO Peter Wennink expressed concerns about Dutch political decisions limiting work immigration, saying such measures could have major consequences for ASML, which employs over 9,000 non-Dutch nationals (40% of its 22,860 Dutch employees). The Dutch government responded with 'Project Beethoven' and pledged €2.5 billion in infrastructure and education to prevent ASML from leaving.

In August 2023, the DOJ sued SpaceX for violating the Immigration and Nationality Act by routinely discouraging and refusing to hire asylees and refugees from September 2018 through May 2022. SpaceX falsely claimed export control laws barred hiring non-citizens and green card holders, screening applicants by citizenship status. Out of nearly 10,000 hires, only one asylee was hired - four months after the DOJ investigation began. The case was dismissed in February 2025 after the Trump administration took office, with Musk calling it 'lawfare.'

On March 15, 2022, Brian Chesky along with co-founders Joe Gebbia, Nathan Blecharczyk and his wife Elizabeth committed to personally match up to $10 million in donations to Airbnb.org to help house refugees fleeing Ukraine. Chesky had previously stated on CNBC that he personally put in 'millions of dollars' to the initiative. By August 2022, Airbnb.org successfully housed 100,000 Ukrainian refugees.

Clearview AI sold its facial recognition technology to over 3,100 US agencies including the FBI (contract signed December 2021), ICE ($2.3M contract for immigration enforcement), NYPD (11,000+ searches), and hundreds of local police departments. The company specifically marketed its use for immigration enforcement under ICE's ImmigrationOS system. CEO Hoan Ton-That actively pursued federal expansion, telling Reuters in 2022 the company would 'redouble its efforts' to convert trial users to permanent customers.

In August 2019, approximately 60 Palantir employees signed a petition calling for the company to end its contracts with ICE, citing the company's role in family separations and immigration enforcement. Around 200 workers also confronted CEO Alex Karp in a signed letter about the issue. This followed the Mississippi raids and revelations about Palantir's role in targeting immigrant families.

Palantir's FALCON mobile app was used by ICE agents during the largest single-state immigration raid in US history at Mississippi food processing plants. 680 workers were arrested, with children returning from their first day of school to find parents missing. The raids were described as traumatic for the community.

In 2019, amid widespread criticism of Palantir's ICE contracts following family separations, Alex Karp publicly defended the work, saying that while separations are 'a really tough, complex, jarring moral issue,' he favors 'a fair but rigorous immigration policy.' He stated the ICE relationship 'is here to stay' and seemed sympathetic to Trump's border stance.