From Palo Alto to Washington D.C., RNs condemned Palantir’s support of ICE kidnappings and imprisonment

On Thursday, Aug. 27, hundreds of registered nurses – joined by patients and community allies – mobilized to demand hospitals and elected officials immediately cut ties with artificial intelligence giant Palantir. The nurses, who are members of National Nurses United, the nation’s largest union of registered nurses, stopped traffic in an act of civil disobedience in eight cities: Palo Alto, California; Los Angeles, California; Chicago, Illinois; Washington, D.C.; Portland, Maine; Asheville, North Carolina; Austin, Texas; and New Orleans, Louisiana.

The actions included visual displays of the deadly costs of Palantir’s products, including its development and operation of ELITE, an application used by federal agents that identifies people for arrest using, in part, improperly obtained Medicaid data.

In each city, nurses placed 50 pairs of baby shoes in the street – one pair of shoes representing every 10 babies who have been detained since President Trump took office. Passersby could also see large images of the heart-wrenching notes written by some of the 6,000 children who have been imprisoned by federal agents since the second Trump term began.

The nurses also held large red umbrellas emblazoned with eyes, symbolizing that nurses are keeping an eye on Palantir’s harmful activities.

“Union nurses cannot be silent when our most vulnerable people, babies and children, are being detained by federal immigration agents,” said NNU President Jamie Brown, RN. “While our patients and neighbors are living in fear of immigration raids enabled by Palantir, our hospitals are facing huge cuts and our patients are facing mounting health care costs because of H.R. 1. Nurses aren’t just saying no to Palantir, but we’re calling for our public resources to go toward the benefit of working people, not billionaires and their corporations.”

While the U.S. government and corporations award the company billions of dollars in contracts to Palantir, the U.S. health care system faces a dire threat. H.R. 1 is the 2025 budget bill, pushed through by Republicans and President Trump, that cut more than $1 trillion in Medicaid and Medicare funding to give billionaires tax breaks, militarize immigration enforcement, and fund endless wars abroad. Not only will these cuts threaten health coverage for millions of people, they risk closures and service cuts at more than 600 hospitals nationwide, according to new NNU research.

NNU President Brown continued: “What we know is the money spent on ICE detention could fund health care for at least 12 million children every single year. Nurses and our allies condemn these unjust, misguided political choices. Everyone deserves health care, education, and housing. Our politics should not be controlled by billionaires.”

Purge Palantir allies join RNs nationwide.

Across the eight cities, NNU nurses were joined by community allies in their calls to “Purge Palantir!”.

“Palantir makes money by enabling mass violence in the U.S. and around the world,” said Kenny Morris, campaigns strategist for the American Friends Service Committee. “The surveillance company has no place in our hospitals, our utilities, our investments, or our government. This day of action shows just how many communities are organizing to push our institutions to cut ties with Palantir.”

“It is critical times like these, where Palantir brings us together across movements, crystallizing a common enemy,” said Olivia DiNucci, D.C. organizer for CodePink. “The fight for Medicare for All, the fight to end the genocide in Gaza, the fight to end mass surveillance and deportations are unified to cut ties and influence of Palantir and its profiting on mass deportations, genocide and war, and a for-profit healthcare system."

“In a moment where Big Tech is attempting to become the final decision maker of what is democracy, freedom, and what is the definition of privacy, we see it essential for all sectors of labor and organizing to come together against this common evil,” said Cathy Carrillo, organizer for Mijente. “Palantir is at the forefront of the chaos happening to immigrant communities and the attempt to expand surveillance and AI in all other sectors. We are united in the call to Purge Palantir.”

“Palantir is a secretive data and AI company whose technology facilitates ICE terror and enables the Israeli military’s genocide on Gaza,” said Dani Noble, campaigns organizer for Jewish Voice for Peace. “Palantir should have no place in our hospitals — it’s designed to control and to harm. It is a company built on unlawful surveillance deeply embedded in policing and war, all to generate profit for right-wing billionaires.”

“Palantir’s AI technology is used to harm our communities by putting patient care in the hands of a machine, identifying and tracking immigrants for ICE abduction, and targeting Palestinians in Gaza for assassination,” said fatima mohammadi, director of organizing at U.S. Campaign for Palestinian Rights (USCPR). “The well-being and safety of our loved ones and neighbors are at stake. Palantir out of hospitals! Every institution must cut ties with Palantir now.” [Note: the lowercase name is intentional.]

Nurses say: “Palantir Out!”

Palantir’s growing notoriety – fueled by a growing wave of grassroots protests organized by nurses and criticism from employees, clients, and elected officials – have threatened its business and made its brand politically toxic in the United States and abroad. However, Palantir continues to benefit from its close relationship with the Trump administration, and, increasingly, with the U.S. hospital industry.

From 2009 to 2025, Palantir received $2.5 billion in federal government funding, but this number has grown tremendously in just the past year. Last July, the Department of Defense announced a $10 billion agreement with Palantir to use its technology to share data across federal agencies, enabling unprecedented surveillance power. This followed a $30 million contract awarded to Palantir by the Department of Homeland Security to build an AI-powered system that would identify immigrants for deportation. In Feb. 2026, the Department of Homeland Security and Palantir signed a $1 billion contract.

In the hospital industry, already, Palantir manages more than one-fifth of U.S. hospital beds. For nurses, this marks a dangerous threat to the nursing profession, which is seeing a glut of untested and unregulated technology introduced into patient care settings.

The firm’s technology is already being used for automated scheduling and staffing in the largest for-profit hospital group in the country, Hospital Corporation of America (HCA). Timpani, otherwise known as HCA Inspire, is used for nursing staff scheduling, removing hospitals’ local managers from staffing decisions and replacing them with an anonymous office in Nashville.

Even these limited applications are already exacerbating the nationwide staffing crisis, as executives are rushing to use untested and unregulated technology to replace clinical judgement and make critical health care decisions like how many nurses are on a unit to take care of patients on a shift.

Other hospitals represented by NNU, like MaineHealth, are also using Palantir technologies. As with HCA, MaineHealth has refused to disclose the extent of the hospital’s cooperation with Palantir, including how patients’ and health care workers’ data are being protected. That lack of transparency only underscores the importance of demanding hospitals purge Palantir out of their operations.

In addition to working closely with the U.S. government and hospitals, Palantir has also entered into partnership with Israel’s Ministry of Defense to support their “war effort” in Gaza which Israeli human rights organizations, the globe’s leading association of genocide scholars, and a United Nations Special Committee, among others, have concluded is a genocide. More than 1,500 health care workers, in addition to tens of thousands of innocent civilians, have been murdered in Gaza since Israeli forces invaded in October 2023.