WaPo: Palantir’s Immigration OS software now assists U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement in tracking and accelerating deportations of undocumented immigrants, as detailed in federal procurement filings and interviews with project insiders.
The $30 million no-bid contract, renewed in September to $60 million, enables near real-time monitoring of border encounters, asylum applications, and voluntary departures, aligning with Trump’s mass deportation push, including pausing applications from 19 countries.
CEO Alex Karp, once a vocal Democrat critical of Trump, defends the project as a “progressive” stance on immigration control, citing European wage depression and social issues from “unfettered” migration: “For over two decades, I have implored our political elite to take seriously the truly progressive position on immigration: one of extreme skepticism.”
Karp’s shift intensified after the October 7, 2023, Hamas attack on Israel, drawing him closer to Republican hawks, while the company revised its code of conduct in March to remove anti-bias pledges in response to Trump’s diversity bans.
Internal dissent persists, with seven months into the project leading to employee resignations like Brianna Katherine Martin’s in May over perceived authoritarianism; critics, including Y Combinator’s Paul Graham, decry it as “police state” infrastructure. XPOST
WaPo: Palantir’s Immigration OS software now assists U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement in tracking and accelerating deportations of undocumented immigrants, as detailed in federal procurement filings and interviews with project insiders.
The $30 million no-bid contract, renewed in September to $60 million, enables near real-time monitoring of border encounters, asylum applications, and voluntary departures, aligning with Trump’s mass deportation push, including pausing applications from 19 countries.
CEO Alex Karp, once a vocal Democrat critical of Trump, defends the project as a “progressive” stance on immigration control, citing European wage depression and social issues from “unfettered” migration: “For over two decades, I have implored our political elite to take seriously the truly progressive position on immigration: one of extreme skepticism.”
Karp’s shift intensified after the October 7, 2023, Hamas attack on Israel, drawing him closer to Republican hawks, while the company revised its code of conduct in March to remove anti-bias pledges in response to Trump’s diversity bans.
Internal dissent persists, with seven months into the project leading to employee resignations like Brianna Katherine Martin’s in May over perceived authoritarianism; critics, including Y Combinator’s Paul Graham, decry it as “police state” infrastructure. XPOST
At the start of 2018, the company attempted to launch an Initial Coin Offering (ICO) which would enable it to enable payments (and earn the cash that comes from doing so). The initial signals were promising, especially given Telegram’s user base is already fairly crypto-savvy. It raised an initial tranche of cash – worth more than a billion dollars – to help develop the coin before opening sales to the public. Unfortunately, third-party sales of coins bought in those initial fundraising rounds raised the ire of the SEC, which brought the hammer down on the whole operation. In 2020, officials ordered Telegram to pay a fine of $18.5 million and hand back much of the cash that it had raised. Some people used the platform to organize ahead of the storming of the U.S. Capitol in January 2021, and last month Senator Mark Warner sent a letter to Durov urging him to curb Russian information operations on Telegram. After fleeing Russia, the brothers founded Telegram as a way to communicate outside the Kremlin's orbit. They now run it from Dubai, and Pavel Durov says it has more than 500 million monthly active users. The War on Fakes channel has repeatedly attempted to push conspiracies that footage from Ukraine is somehow being falsified. One post on the channel from February 24 claimed without evidence that a widely viewed photo of a Ukrainian woman injured in an airstrike in the city of Chuhuiv was doctored and that the woman was seen in a different photo days later without injuries. The post, which has over 600,000 views, also baselessly claimed that the woman's blood was actually makeup or grape juice. The regulator said it has been undertaking several campaigns to educate the investors to be vigilant while taking investment decisions based on stock tips.
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