Palantir Technologies (PLTR, Financials) defended its work with U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement after Y Combinator co-founder Paul Graham criticized the company over a $30 million contract to build a deportation-tracking system.
The system, called the Immigration Lifecycle Operating System or ImmigrationOS, is designed to help ICE identify people for deportation and monitor self-deportations, according to federal filings.
Graham posted on X, formerly known as Twitter, “It's a very exciting time in tech right now. If you're a first-rate programmer, there are a huge number of other places you can go work rather than at the company building the infrastructure of the police state.”
Ted Mabrey, Palantir's global head of commercial, responded online, writing, “I'm looking forward to the next set of hires that decided to apply to Palantir after reading your post.”
While Mabrey did not address the specifics of the ICE contract, he said Palantir's work with the Department of Homeland Security began after the 2011 killing of U.S. federal agent Jaime Zapata by the Zetas cartel.
“When people are alive because of what you built, and others are dead because what you built was not yet good enough, you develop a very different perspective on the meaning of your work,” he said.
He compared the current backlash to the protests over Google's involvement in Project Maven, a military drone image analysis program that sparked employee pushback in 2018. “Google has subsequently signaled that it's become more open to defense work again,” Mabrey said.
Palantir, which has been recruiting on college campuses, has used slogans like “a moment of reckoning has arrived for the West.” Mabrey encouraged potential applicants to read CEO Alexander Karp's book The Technological Republic, which calls for stronger ties between the tech industry and government.
“We hire believers,” Mabrey wrote. “Not in the sense of homogeneity of belief but in the intrinsic capacity to believe in something bigger than yourself.”
Graham responded by asking Palantir to commit publicly to not building tools that violate the U.S. Constitution. “But I'm hoping that if they [make the commitment], and some Palantir employee is one day asked to do something illegal, he'll say ‘I didn't sign up for this' and refuse,” he wrote.
Mabrey called the question “the ‘will you promise to stop beating your wife' court room parlor trick,” but said Palantir had already made similar pledges. “We have made this promise so many ways from Sunday,” he wrote, adding that the company's 3,500 employees are “grinding only because they believe they are making the world a better place every single day.”
