The software company, which focuses on data analytics, is not unfamiliar with controversy, given long-standing accusations that its tools are used for government surveillance.
But after securing more than $900 million in federal contracts this year, including a high-profile contract with Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE), Palantir has found itself at the center of concerns about how the government is using Americans' data.
"The immigration and surveillance space is an area that is rife with tons of civil rights violations, including for U.S. citizens. There's just huge problematic elements in the collection of data, and also what is done with this data," Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-N.Y.) told The Hill.
"There is a very large prospect here of, under the guise of immigration, a dragnet for national data for everyone that's being collected here. And what that is being used for, under what guise, and how that's being implemented — there's a huge amount of unanswered questions and what happened with the data porting under DOGE and whose hands that is under right now," she said, referring to the Department of Government Efficiency.
Palantir did not respond to a request for comment from The Hill, but the company has long pushed back on accusations that its technology is used for government surveillance or other potentially unethical objectives.
Palantir CEO and co-founder Alex Karp argued in early December that the firm is "highly ethical," while also acknowledging that its products could be used to process data from legal surveillance.
"Are we building a database that can be used for surveillance? No," Karp said at The New York Times DealBook Summit. "OK, but the more subtle version is if you're legally surveilled … could you put it in our product? Yes. Are our enemies surveilled using data that goes into our product? One hundred percent, and I completely support that."
The company, which was co-founded by venture capitalist Peter Thiel in 2003, has seen its federal contracts expand steadily over the years.
They grew from $4.4 million in 2009 to $541.2 million in 2024, according to USAspending.gov, a government site that tracks federal spending.
In 2025, Palantir's federal contracts nearly doubled, rising to $970.5 million. This has proven fruitful for the company, which has repeatedly posted strong earnings this year, crossing $1 billion in revenue for the first time in the second quarter.
The contracts included a $30 million deal with ICE in April to build an "Immigration Lifestyle Operating System," referred to as ImmigrationOS, to track self-deportations, help select targets for arrests and create an "Immigration Lifecycle Process" to increase the efficiency of deportations.
Check out the full report at TheHill.com.
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