Like a specter, Peter Thiel has long haunted the margins of the MAGA movement. As an early Trump backer, the tech billionaire has often been credited with helping to launch the former reality TV star’s political career. Since then, the tech billionaire’s influence can be felt in various parts of the MAGA agenda. Many of Thiel’s friends and associates are spread throughout the current administration, while others can be credited with having played pivotal roles in the campaign that swept Trump to victory last fall. Now, Thiel’s powerful defense contractor, Palantir, is also said to be playing an integral role in Trump’s deportation machine, the likes of which may soon (according to Trump) target U.S. citizens.
Internal messages and company information leaked to 404 Media show that the creepy data company is actively helping the Trump administration to identify and hunt down people who have been targeted for deportation. The outlet, which received Slack messages and information from internal Palantir wikis, explains the significance of the leaks:
The leak shows that Palantir’s work with ICE includes producing leads for law enforcement to find people to deport and keeping track of the logistics of Trump’s mass deportation effort, and provides concrete insight into the Trump administration’s wish to leverage data to enforce its immigration agenda. The internal communications also show Palantir leadership preparing for a potential backlash from employees or outsiders, with them writing FAQs that can be sent to friends or family that start to ask about Palantir’s work with ICE.
One of the projects that Palantir is working on for the government has been dubbed “Enforcement Prioritization and Targeting.” It is described as an effort to “support the development of an accurate picture of actionable leads based on existing law enforcement datasets to allow law enforcement to prioritize enforcement actions.” Palantir has been paid tens of millions of dollars for this program, 404 writes. The company already has a $95 million contract with ICE, which gives the government access to Palantir’s Investigative Case Management (ICM) system. The ICM software allows ICE officials “document investigative activities leading up to the prosecution of criminal parties,” the company says.
The leaks also apparently show that Palantir has told its employees that it “remains committed” to “privacy and civil liberty protections,” which seems a little bit like an industrial slaughterhouse claiming it remains committed to animal welfare. An internal wiki describes the company’s attitude towards human rights concerns:
“Palantir is cognizant of the risks to privacy and civil liberties involved in these mission sets and how they may be influenced by shifts in priorities,” another section reads. “Many risks will not be within our means to address—some are structural and must be fully baked into the equation by virtue of a willingness to engage at all in these efforts. It’s important to note that there will be failures in the removal operations process,” it adds.
I guess when your business’s main priority is making money by helping a government ship people off to foreign prisons, some risks to civil liberties just can’t be helped. Gizmodo reached out to Palantir for more information.
The Trump administration has ramped up its deportation efforts in recent weeks, targeting a variety of individuals, many of whom are highly unusual, given that they have no known criminal records and have not been afforded due process. The Supreme Court recently made a vague ruling that stated the Trump administration should “facilitate” the return of Kilmar Abrego Garcia, a Maryland resident who was recently sent to a prison in El Salvador. The government claims Garcia is a gang member, but hasn’t substantiated those claims with evidence other than a vague 2019 police report that references anonymous allegations against Garcia. Additionally, while the government has claimed that Garcia was deported due to an “administrative error,” the administration has also shown no interest in correcting that error.
These kinds of legally questionable deportation operations may soon be directed at other types of people living in the U.S. During a recent press conference, Trump claimed he would like to deport U.S. citizens in very much the same way that Garcia had been deported. “We always have to obey the laws, but we also have homegrown criminals that push people into subways, that hit elderly ladies on the back of the head with a baseball bat when they’re not looking, that are absolute monsters,” Trump told reporters. “I’d like to include them.” It remains a hanging question why the administration is mostly deporting men with no known criminal records if Trump’s primary concern is crime.
Similarly, Trump’s counterterrorism czar, Sebastian Gorka, recently suggested that Americans who oppose the administration’s operations are terrorist abettors. “We have people who love America, like the president, like his cabinet, like the directors of his agencies who want to protect Americans,” Gorka told Newsmax. “And then there is the other side, that is on the side of the cartel members, on the side of the illegal aliens, on the side of the terrorists. And you have to ask yourself: are they technically aiding and abetting them? Because aiding and abetting criminals and terrorists is a crime in federal statute.”
Remarks made by Trump and his cabinet have drawn an intense backlash from legal scholars, including many conservatives. The consensus seems to be that the administration’s deportation actions are “obviously illegal,” as one scholar put it. Other critics, like historian Timothy Snyder, have noted that shipping undesirables to specialized “zones” to suffer untold horrors is exactly what the Nazis did during WWII.
