The war inside Palantir: Data-mining firm’s ties to ICE under attack by employees

After Google dropped a defense contract over employee pressure, Palantir’s leaders doubled down on controversial work with the U.S. government

By Douglas MacMillan and Elizabeth Dwoskin August 22 at 11:37 AM

Alex Karp faced a dilemma last year, when employees of the data-mining company Palantir confronted the chief executive with their concerns over a partnership with Immigration and Customs Enforcement, according to three people familiar with the incident.

Palantir provided digital profiling tools to the federal agency as it carried out President Trump’s increasingly controversial policies for apprehending and deporting undocumented immigrants, troubling more than 200 employees who signed a letter to Karp, the people said.

Ending the contracts with ICE would risk a backlash in Washington, where Palantir was quickly becoming a go-to provider of data-mining services to a wide range of federal agencies. Data mining is a process of compiling multitudes of information from disparate sources to show patterns and relationships. Google’s decision, earlier the same year, to end a contract with the Pentagon over pressure from its employees had chilled the Internet giant’s relationships with some government leaders who accused it of betraying American interests.

Karp refused to budge. He renewed an ICE contract worth up to $42 million and defended the program at a company town hall meeting, the people said. In media interviews and an online ad campaign this year, Karp bashed Google for backing out of its government contract and suggested Palantir wouldn’t do the same.

-snip-