It took just a few months into President Donald Trump’s second term for Palantir employees to begin questioning the company’s commitments to civil liberties. Last fall, Palantir appeared to become the technological backbone of Trump’s immigration enforcement machinery, supplying software that identified, tracked, and assisted in the deportation of immigrants on behalf of the Department of Homeland Security.
This shift prompted current and former employees to sound the alarm, with concerns growing over the company’s direction.
Around that time, two former employees reconnected by phone. As soon as the call connected, one asked the other, “Are you tracking Palantir’s descent into fascism?”
“That was their greeting,” the other former employee recalled. “There’s this feeling not of ‘Oh, this is unpopular and hard,’ but ‘This feels wrong.’”
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