Report
Palantir: The technology behind Trump’s totalitarian ambitions
The company’s involvement offers a window into the convergence between the Trump regime and the tech oligopoly from an authoritarian perspective.
An Associated Press investigation recently revealed the level of automation being used in operations conducted by the U.S. Border Patrol (USBP). The “border defense” agency is among the most aggressive in the constellation of institutions put in charge of the “mass deportation.”
Although it has traditionally held jurisdiction only over border crossings and within 100 miles from the national borders, as part of the anti-immigration apparatus established by the Trump administration, USBP agents are now on the front lines of paramilitary operations to round up “illegal” workers in U.S. cities and across the entire national territory. As Commander Gregory Bovino reportedly boasted: “We go wherever the fuck we want, whenever the fuck we want!”
The AP investigation revealed that the USBP is also engaged in large-scale surveillance of the population through the monitoring of the “driving patterns” of motorists.
Through a widespread network of cameras, the USBP reportedly monitors vehicle routes indiscriminately via license plate identification and a system that automatically flags “anomalous” routes. Once “suspicious” behavior is identified based on origin, destination, chosen route and other parameters, the alert is transmitted to agents who stop the vehicle in question under some pretext, subjecting the driver to interrogation and possible search.
This procedure appears to be in open violation of the Fourth Amendment to the U.S. Constitution, which requires “probable cause” for a stop to protect against “unreasonable searches.”
The system is based on the massive capacity to gather and analyze data in real time. In July, the U.S. government announced a $170 million contract with Palantir for the supply and management of artificial intelligence for surveillance and the “predictive control” of unauthorized immigration. The company’s involvement offers a window into the convergence between the Trump regime and the tech oligopoly from an authoritarian perspective.
Palantir is the company founded by Peter Thiel, former partner of Elon Musk and patriarch of the Silicon Valley neoconservatives (as well as the political sponsor of JD Vance). Under the direction of CEO Alex Karp, the company has for years pursued primacy in the sector of applied artificial intelligence, developing automated data analysis systems for the military and police. Palantir’s software for “data integration and analysis” is named Gotham for military and intelligence applications, and Foundry for commercial and civil administration ones. In both cases, it involves algorithms that allow for the analysis and refinement of massive quantities of data, enabling the identification of dynamics – including predictive ones – to anticipate and forecast enemy moves and criminal phenomena.
The dystopian scenario of AI applied to war and social control found its first experimental applications among particular segments of the U.S. police forces, later benefiting from the war in Ukraine, which, according to Karp himself, has been of infinite value for the company’s research and development of military applications. Palantir’s systems have also been used by the IDF in Gaza for “target acquisition” in the Strip.
Alex Karp is a fervent Zionist who has repeatedly advocated for Silicon Valley companies to offer their support to Israel and, more generally, in the service of Western geopolitical supremacy. With immigration becoming the focus and with the contracts received from the current U.S. administration, Palantir’s total surveillance systems are now becoming fully operational on American soil, without any regulation or oversight. For instance, Trump has been mulling an executive order to forbid states from issuing any regulations on artificial intelligence – a sector deemed essential for “national security” and the arms race with China.
In this context, the government granted contracts to Palantir without oversight or congressional debate. In September, a further assignment worth $30 million was announced for the fine-tuning of what has been named ImmigrationOS – a system capable of integrating the databases and operations of all Department of Homeland Security (DHS) agencies plus those of bodies such as the Internal Revenue Service (IRS), the Department of Motor Vehicles (DMV) and Health and Human Services (HHS), into a sort of general operating system aimed at “remigration.” In this system, AI algorithms will perform cross-analyses to identify “illegal aliens” and streamline deportations – a panopticon which can obviously be extended to all dissent. The suppression of dissent has been a parallel objective of ICE’s operations.
All of this outlines the transformation of the anti-immigration complex into a paramilitary intelligence and control machine, in which masked agents are only the final manifestation of a broader technological surveillance apparatus. This is a public-private complex, but increasingly unbalanced toward the latter “market” sphere, which is being gifted large-scale public funding with virtually no control.
This techno-totalitarian acceleration has been the focus of the conference entitled The birth, Growth and Future of Palantir, the Company That Sells Power, organized by the Center for State Reform, and the subject of Authoritarian Stack, a report by Francesca Bria (published in Italy in Le Monde Diplomatique, published as a supplement by il manifesto). The report traces the foundational act of this “infrastructure of control” to the $10 billion mega-contract with which the Pentagon entrusted Palantir with the automation of military systems.
The company thus covers an increasingly strategic role as the operating system of the government itself, opening the door to what the report calls a form of “privatized sovereignty,” a trend that sees increasingly substantial portions of governance outsourced to unappealable algorithms. This is a scenario in which democracy persists only as a simulacrum, “preserved for stability while its operational capacity is in the process of being emptied out and replaced.”
Originally published at https://ilmanifesto.it/palantir-tecnologie-veggenti-per-la-grande-deportazione on 2025-12-02