"Six arrested at protest of Palantir, tech company building deportation software for Trump admin", June 26, 2025

Six protestors who demonstrated in front of the New York City offices of Palantir Technologies were arrested... The demonstrators had gathered to bring attention to the controversial firm and the work it does to power the deportation of immigrants from the US.

The protestors stood in front of the Palantir offices on Manhattan’s Avenue of the Americas, linking arms to block entrance into the building and forcing several people attempting to enter to shove past them. At one point, several demonstrators entered the lobby of the building holding up signs that read “Palantir powers ICE”, referring to US Immigration and Customs Enforcement.

The protest was organized by Planet Over Profit, a climate justice group that also organizes against systemic inequality, with support from immigrant rights group Mijente. Police broke up the demonstration after roughly an hour, and the six demonstrators who were arrested and taken to the seventh precinct were released by 11.20am.

... Videos shared captured by representatives of Planet Over Profit showed some people attempting to enter the premises pushing the protestors – it is not clear in the footage whether they were employees of Palantir. Chouinard was released with a summons to appear in court on charges of disorderly conduct.

“We met a lot of physical violence during the arrest itself,” Chouinard told the Guardian. “I personally was not planning on being arrested. I was just using my body to physically stand there and myself and others around me were repeatedly shoved and pushed to the ground and were grabbed. Several police officers were really physical and pushing us around.”

Chouinard said they attended the protest because they want to stop Palantir from enabling agencies that are “hurting and disappearing my neighbors”.

“We’re disrupting Palantir’s business as usual because producing AI that makes fascism stronger and more efficient does not belong in NYC,” Chouinard said in a statement. “Palantir is in the business of tracking and surveilling all of us and it’s our responsibility to track them back: they’re in bed with the Trump administration, Ice, IOF [the Israeli Defense Forces] and others. From NYC to LA to Gaza, Palantir is one company making unspeakable horrors happen.”

The company did not immediately respond to a request for comment on the protest.

...

In a letter sent in mid-June, 10 Democratic lawmakers said that Palantir’s work building a “mega-database” for the Trump administration, which would gather Americans’ personal information from multiple government agencies and centralize it into one repository, as was reported by the New York Times, would violate federal privacy laws.

The company posted a rebuttal to the letter on X: “To be very clear: Palantir is not building a master database, and Palantir is neither conducting nor enabling mass surveillance of American citizens. We do not operate the systems, access the data, or make decisions about its use.”

The protestors did not expect Palantir to answer demands to halt its work with Ice and other arms of the federal government. Their goal, according to Liv Senghor, a lead organizer with Planet Over Profit, was to mobilize “the average American”.

“We want regular people who care about free speech and freedom of privacy to understand how entrenched Palantir is, not only in our government, our military, but in our daily lives,” Senghor told the Guardian after police broke up the protest. “We want to foment enough anger and discontent at Palantir that we get a groundswell of everyday people who they actually have to listen to.”

The organizers of the protest have also planned a protest in front of Palantir’s Palo Alto offices...