The software company Palantir is known for their defense contracts, but their client list doesn’t stop there. This year, they developed an app to help ICE find people they’ve targeted for deportation. Some of their other clients have a problem with this.
1500 nurses marched to ICE’s San Francisco field office on Wednesday chanting, “Hey hey, ho ho, Palantir has got to go!” They want public institutions, including hospitals, to cut ties with Palantir, which they say is aiding and abetting ICE’s threat to democracy.
“One of our own, Alex Pretti, died protecting the communities, just standing up to this dehumanization of immigrant communities,” Michelle Gutierrez Vo, president of the California Nurses Association, told KALW.
“One of the biggest hospitals in the nation, HCA, they're using Palantir,” said Vo. HCA uses Palantir’s AI to help automate staffing, patient scheduling, and insurance claims. “They're taking that data, the patient's data, and they're using it to surveil the patients,” Vo said.
A Palantir spokesperson told KALW the company never shares data between customers (like from a hospital to ICE). But Vo doesn’t find that reassuring.
What Palantir can’t do is stop government agencies from sharing information with each other, which Trump ordered them to do in March. ELITE, the app they created for ICE, sources its data from the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services, which manages Medicaid.
Nurses say the Medicaid data, which includes addresses and immigration status, should never have been shared with ICE and Palantir. The company told NPR in July that they’d purged that dataset after 20 states sued the Trump administration for sharing it.
Palantir did not respond to questions about whether their ELITE app has any measures to prevent the abuse of private information, saying only that they strictly uphold their commitment to protecting privacy and civil liberties. But the company did dispute the longstanding claim that they’re the ones building a master database for Trump on their blog – that’s the job of the government.
Nurses want the money that hospitals and the government spend on contracts with Palantir to instead go to their patients. Recent cuts to Medicaid through the Republican omnibus bill HR 1 have forced at least 12 California hospitals to reduce their workforce, 5 in the Bay Area alone, according to Becker’s ASC Review.
Next week, the nurses say they plan to protest PG&E and demand they end their contract with Palantir. After that, they say they’ll “confront” the CEO of Flock, Garrett Langley.
