Palantir exec defends company’s immigration surveillance work
One of the founders of startup accelerator Y Combinator offered unsparing criticism this weekend of the controversial data analytics company Palantir, leading a company executive to offer an extensive defense of Palantir’s work.
The back-and-forth came after federal filings showed that U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) — tasked with carrying out the Trump administration’s aggressive deportation strategy — is paying Palantir $30 million to create what it’s calling the Immigration Lifecycle Operating System, or ImmigrationOS, to help ICE decide who to target for deportation, as well as offering “near real-time visibility” into self-deportations.
Y Combinator founder Paul Graham shared headlines about Palantir’s contract on X, writing, “It’s a very exciting time in tech right now. There are many other companies that will hire you if you are a good programmer. Mabrey compared Graham’s criticism to protests over Google’s Project Maven in 2018, which eventually led the company to stop its work analyzing drone images Mabrey encouraged anyone interested in Palantir’s job to read Alexander Karp’s book, “The Technological Republic” by the CEO. The book The company is recruiting on university campuses, with signs proclaiming “a moment of reckoning for the West.” Belief is required because 1) our work is very, very hard and 2) you should expect to weather attacks like this all the time; from both sides of the political Belief is required because 1) our work is very, very hard and 2) you should expect to weather attacks like this all the time; from all sides of the political aisle.”
Graham then pressed Mabrey to “commit publicly on behalf of Palantir not to build things that help the government violate the US constitution,” though he acknowledged in another post that such a commitment would have “no legal force.”
“But I’m hoping that if they
, and some Palantir employee is one day asked to do something illegal, he’ll say ‘I didn’t sign up for this’ and refuse,” Graham wrote.
Mabrey in turn compared Graham’s question to “the ‘will you promise to stop beating your wife’ court room parlor trick,” but he added that the company has “made this promise so many ways from Sunday,” starting with a commitment to “the 3500 enormously thoughtful people who are grinding only because they believe they are making the world a better place every single day as they see first hand what we are actually doing.”
