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Protesters blockaded the offices of Peter Thiel's data company Palantir on Thursday, calling for it to stop building surveillance systems for ICE and working with the Israeli military.
Between 130 and 200 demonstrators chanted and banged drums outside the firm's building in Palo Alto, California, blocking the street and climbing on top of large box trucks that had been parked by Palantir in front of the entrance.
In New York City, six people were arrested after police broke up a protest at Palantir's Manhattan office. A crowd of about 35 linked arms to bar access to the building, at one point briefly entering the lobby, while another 20 or so people gathered in support.
"This is a billion dollar company that is profiting from and enabling ICE that are separating our families," 27-year-old Marcus Romero of the Alliance of Californians for Community Empowerment (ACCE) told the crowd in Palo Alto.
"Today, Palantir and the Trump administration are targeting immigrants. Tomorrow, it'll be anyone who disagrees with the MAGA agenda."
A spokesperson for Palantir clarified that the trucks were hired for an event and were unrelated to the protest, but otherwise declined to comment. ICE did not respond to a request for comment.
Palantir's stock has soared by more than 250 percent since the 2024 election as it takes an increasingly central role in President Donald Trump's push for "mass deportations", earning a reported $113m through new and existing contracts.
Founded in 2003, with backing from arch-conservative Peter Thiel and the CIA, Palantir sells data-crunching services to companies, government agencies, intelligence services, and militaries. Its name comes from the all-seeing crystal balls used by Sauron's forces in Lord of the Rings.
Having first started working with ICE under Barack Obama, it is now alleged to be helping the Trump administration build a comprehensive surveillance system that pools data from many government departments, as well as working extensively with the Israel Defense Forces.
Palantir has pushed back on the former claim, saying: "To be very clear, Palantir is not building a master database, and Palantir is neither conducting nor enabling mass surveillance of American citizens."
"Our product is used on occasion to kill people," said CEO Alex Karp in an interview with Axios in 2020. "If you're looking for a terrorist in the world now you're probably using our government product... I have asked myself, 'if I were younger at college, would I be protesting me?'"
Thursday's demonstrations were organized by the campaign group Planet Over Profit, with help from a coalition of local groups including ACCE, Bay Resistance, and the immigration rights group Mijente.
The demonstration in Palo Alto was lively but peaceable, featuring drums, an amplified electric guitar, a man dressed as the Statue of Liberty, ‘Stop AI’ activists warning about the coming machine apocalypse, and no arrests.
The Independent counted around 130 to 140 people in attendance, while organizers estimated roughly 250 had come and gone over the course of the event.
After blocking the street outside Palantir's unassuming redbrick office, and briefly making way for an ambulance, the crowd marched to a nondescript building nearby where organizers said the company was holding a developer conference to recruit new talent, slapping rhythmically on the windows and chanting "quit your jobs!"
"We shut their s*** down! They left! It’s an abandoned event space right now," one organizer announced soon afterwards, to wild cheers.
"Our intel tells us that... one of the most important things we can do to hurt Palantir right now is disrupting their recruitment pipeline by hurting their brand image, to the point where even very apolitical recent college graduates [feel] that it's social suicide."
Laila Ali, an organizer with the Palestinian Youth Movement, led the crowd in chants of “free, free Palestine!”, while another — a dissident Google employee going by the alias ‘Jam’ — described Palantir as part of an effort by tech moguls to build "a totalitarian police surveillance state at a scale unprecedented in human history".
"The oligarchs see Trump's authoritarian tendencies, his deep disinterest in the truth, his vanity and his naked corruption, and they see their chance to ride the wave of fascism with the resources of history's most powerful economic and military empire, the United States," Jam said.
"They need this surveillance state because they also see another holy grail on the horizon. They believe that generative AI can realize a fantasy that they have dreamt of for centuries: a perfectly obedient workforce that they don't have to argue with, that doesn't pester them with basic needs."
Although Palantir did not confirm whether its event was disrupted, one visibly confused event worker did try to deliver equipment, only to find their intended recipients had vanished.
In New York, things got spicier. Caroline Chouinard, a Brooklyn resident who was arrested and charged with disorderly conduct, told The Guardian that police had begun arresting people before giving them a chance to disperse, and that people identifying themselves as Palantir employees had tried to physically push past the demonstrators into the building.
"From NYC to LA to Gaza, Palantir is one company making unspeakable horrors happen. We need to shut them down. I do not want this vile stain on my communities," she said.
