Denver Residents Protest Palantir Headquarters Downtown

Last Wednesday, a small crowd of protestors gathered at the intersection of 17th and Lawrence. Their target? The headquarters of tech giant Palantir, which has resided at the Tabor Center since 2020. Standing in stark contrast to the afternoon rush-hour bustle, attendees led chants and hoisted signs admonishing Palantir for its collaboration with US Immigration and Customs Enforcement and the Israeli military.

“I hate that they’re here in Denver,” said demonstrator and longtime Colorado resident Beverly Jahn. “I really think that the government and everybody made a big effort to bring them into Denver and court them to come to Denver, but they don’t represent anything but the slaughtering of people, and I do not want a company like that in Colorado.”

Since Palantir left its original home in Silicon Valley for Denver nearly five years ago, local social justice groups, including the American Friends Service Committee, the Colorado Palestine Coalition and Denver Anti-War Action, have protested its presence in the Mile High City. So far, the Tabor Center has given no indication of terminating its lease with Palantir, and five years after celebrating the company’s arrival from Palo Alto, local officials remain silent on the organization’s dubious human rights record. 

For Linda Badwan, a longtime Lakewood resident and Colorado Palestine Coalition organizer, Palantir’s physical proximity hits close to home. 

“It’s unacceptable to know that we have a company like that headquartered in the city of Denver. This is why it’s so important that we continue to put pressure, because we want them out. We want them out completely, but we want them out of Denver especially,” Badwan said. “This is not the community that I grew up in and once upon a time felt safe in.”

Badwan, who is originally from Beitin, a village in the occupied West Bank, is working with the Colorado Palestine Lobby and Advocacy Group to push Denver City Council to divest from companies complicit in Israel’s genocidal attacks on Gaza, including Palantir. Over the past month, the group has met with Councilmembers Sarah Parady, Paul Kashmann and Jamie Torres—Badwan says she hopes to meet with the remaining councilmembers in the coming months and that, so far, the meetings have been productive. 

“The city council members, I believe, are starting to realize the complicity that Palantir has in all of this,” Badwan said. “I think they’re working their way through it.”

A history of federal entanglement

Headed by staunch neoliberal Alex Karp and far-right entrepreneur Peter Thiel, Palantir Technologies is a $370B publicly traded company that collects and analyzes data for clients ranging from the Department of Homeland Security to Voyager Space, a Denver security-oriented space tech company. Since the Trump administration took power in January, Palantir has enjoyed increasingly lucrative contracts with the federal government, most recently clinching a 10-year $10 billion contract with the U.S. Army in early August.

Palantir got its start doing data analysis for the U.S. intelligence community in the mid-2000s; its first client was the CIA, and most of its work focused on national security. Political scientist and professor Deborah Avant noted that Palantir’s growth coincided with an industry-wide pivot of defense contractors towards tech and surveillance following the so-called War on Terror.

“(Contractors) were quite aware that the conflicts in Afghanistan and Iraq weren’t going to go on forever, and they began looking at other types of things that they could provide,” said Avant, who teaches international security at the University of Denver. “And increasingly, that was surveillance.”

Palantir leaned in hard, developing “predictive policing” software for the New Orleans and Los Angeles Police Departments, which was later criticized for racial profiling and lack of transparency, and picked up ICE as a client in 2011. This past spring, Palantir announced a new $33 million contract with ICE to develop “ImmigrationOS,” a database aiming to track self-deportations across the United States in real time. 

Though Palantir has shared the three pillars of ImmigrationOS, “targeting and enforcement prioritization,” “self-deportation tracking” and “immigration life-cycle process,” it has not shared how it plans to collect the data necessary to track self-deportation without self-reporting. Palantir did not respond to Bucket List’s request for comment at the time of publication.

“The sell here is more of a real-time location (tracking),” said UCLA Professor Melissa Villas-Nicholas, who researches the intersection of technology, immigration and data. “And, you know, the unknown is part of the character of ICE and Silicon Valley and even our relationship to surveillance.”

Villa-Nicholas also pointed out that, while Palantir hasn’t shared which specific data it plans to draw on for the ImmigrationOS, biodata is particularly vulnerable. 

“That can be anything from fingerprints to DNA to retina scans, but what we’ve seen really recently is tattoos,” Villa-Nicholas said. “Immigrants might come in and provide their biodata to be able to receive something like DACA in the past (or) to receive visas or permanent residency, but it’s the where that goes from there that I’m concerned with. The ownership of that data can be abused as it moves in different systems, and that’s what I feel like we saw with tattoos over this past year.”

But while biodata is highly personal, Villa-Nicholas points out that it also has significant room for error and is ripe for racial profiling. There have been several high-profile cases of people wrongfully detained or deported based on their tattoos, which ICE has incorrectly linked to membership in criminal organizations like MS-13. 

To Jahn, the nonconsensual collection of data at this scale is a danger to everyone. “(ICE) says they’ll come up with a better understanding of how many people are here illegally, which will lead to more deportation,” Jahn said. “I don’t believe deportation is the answer, and I believe that a surveillance state is going to compromise our democracy.”

Palantir has also faced intense criticism over its work with the Israeli military to identify civilian and military targets in the Gaza Strip, where Israel has killed at least 63,000 Palestinians since Oct. 7, 2023, and to surveil civilians in the occupied West Bank.

“It makes me sick to my stomach to know that I reside in a place where we see (Palantir) directly being involved in these horrible, horrible atrocities, whether it’s back home in Palestine or here in our immigrant community,” Badwan said.

One of Palantir’s most notable projects for the Israeli military is the Lavender database, which, according to reporting by +972 magazine and the Guardian, used AI to compile “kill lists” of potential Hamas or Palestinian Islamic Jihad operatives in Gaza to be targeted for assassination. Lavender identified approximately 37,000 suspected militants, many of whom Israeli forces bombed in their homes, killing thousands of civilians in addition to those on the “kill lists.” Israeli intelligence later admitted that the software had a 10% error margin, which they claimed was small enough for widespread use.

“There is this cycle, launched on anxiety around Latinx immigrants, (to) build out the technology, build out these contracts between ICE and Silicon Valley companies, and then implement that technology in other countries where folks are seen as less than,” Villa-Nicholas said. “That would, of course, be towards Palestinians.”

Badwan noted that her family members in the occupied West Bank are also acutely aware of Palantir-supported surveillance, particularly when moving through checkpoints. 

“To do anything, you have to go through the Israeli government,” Badwan said, referencing the tasreeh, or permit, the Israeli government requires for Palestinians to move within or leave the occupied West Bank. “Palantir is directly complicit in making sure and ensuring that Palestinians are suffering on a daily basis, trying to get through the checkpoints (and) even trying to get home.”

In Colorado

As far as Palantir’s effect on ICE activity in Colorado, data provided by the corporation is almost certainly already being used by the agency to inform its operations in the state. That said, Palantir does not have any contracts with local law enforcement, and in 2019, the Colorado legislature barred law enforcement from collaborating with or providing information to ICE.

To Avant, Palantir’s brazen collaboration with the federal government to surveil American residents reflects a broader sign of the times. 

“It’s not just more surveillance of people; it’s the absence of due process around surveillance,” Avant said. “The moves to redistrict, the efforts to constrain lawmakers, you know, having ICE agents show up at democratic rallies, having the National Guard sent into democratically-controlled cities … We’re tumbling very quickly into a non-democratic sphere.”

Looking to the future, Badwan hopes to bring together more local advocacy groups to effectively push the city of Denver to fully divest from Palantir. In the meantime, she plans to continue attending public comment sessions and making sure city council members stay informed about how Palantir’s work is affecting people here in the U.S. and abroad.

“It’s really important to emphasize the connection between all these issues that are happening in Palestine with our immigrants here locally, with our unhoused (community), because all these things are connected,” Badwan said. “It’s something that we’re not going to stop fighting against.”