At approximately 1:45 p.m. Wednesday, September 30, a crowd gathered at Jessie Square in downtown San Francisco and began marching toward the federal building at 630 Sansome Street, home to ICE’s San Francisco field office. KRON reported the crowd appeared to number in the hundreds; organizers and separate reporting from SF Gate cited roughly 1,000 participants. National Nurses United and the California Nurses Association/National Nurses Organizing Committee led the action, bringing healthcare workers alongside community supporters. The target wasn’t ICE alone. It was Palantir Technologies, a San Francisco-based data-analytics company whose reported government contracts have placed it at the center of a sharp and unresolved question: where does software end and enforcement begin?
What Protesters Are Demanding
Organizers framed the march as one front in a coordinated global campaign to hold Palantir accountable for its reported role in immigration enforcement.
Banners reading “People vs. Palantir” moved through downtown alongside the chant “Patients over Palantir!,” connecting the march to nurses’ specific concerns about healthcare institutions maintaining ties with the company. Organizers described Wednesday’s action as part of a broader Global Week of Action against Palantir. Promotional material alleged that Palantir’s technology helps ICE “target, track, and detain” immigrants, language that reflects the protesters’ characterization of the contracts rather than any adjudicated legal finding.
The demands extended well beyond a single contract. Organizers called on hospitals, universities, and pension funds to end their contracts and relationships with Palantir. Protesters also raised broader demands, including the abolition of ICE and Medicare for All, according to SF Gate’s event reporting.
Palantir’s Response, and What the Record Shows
Palantir’s denial is clear, but documented findings from oversight bodies and civil-liberties groups complicate the picture considerably.
A Palantir spokesperson called the protesters’ claims “baseless,” telling Becker’s Hospital Review that the company does not collect or store data, conduct surveillance, or determine immigration-enforcement policy. The company has also said its Foundry platform includes granular security controls and denied that it unlawfully surveils Americans. That is the position Palantir has stated in response to the protest.
Third-party findings tell a more complicated story. The Electronic Frontier Foundation reported that ICE uses Palantir’s ELITE tool for “prioritized enforcement,” including surfacing likely addresses connected to people with final removal orders or serious criminal charges, according to EFF’s account of Palantir’s own description of the system. A New York City comptroller’s letter separately assessed that Palantir’s reported work with ICE’s Enforcement and Removal Operations represented a significant shift from the company’s earlier refusal to contract with that division, which the comptroller tied to concerns about disproportionate immigration enforcement.
Congressional scrutiny is now formal and on the record. A 2026 inquiry led by Rep. Dan Goldman, Sen. Ron Wyden, and Rep. Nydia Velázquez formally requested records about Palantir’s DHS and ICE contracts, including contract values, performance periods, and the specific systems the company supports. That request signals the accountability conversation has moved well past protest signs.
What Comes Next
The pressure on Palantir is arriving from multiple directions at once, and what happens in procurement offices and congressional hearings may matter as much as what happens in the streets.
Procurement reviews, institutional divestment decisions, and the congressional record will shape whether “People vs. Palantir” registers as a pressure campaign or a turning point. Nurses and community groups are not the constituency that typically steers government-technology contracts, and their presence at an ICE field office marks a notable expansion of who is showing up to these debates. The most concrete step available to Palantir is also the one it has not yet taken: a transparent, independent human-rights risk assessment of its ICE work, which the NYC comptroller formally requested. That gap, between what the company says its technology does and what oversight bodies say it enables, is what brought hundreds of people to Jessie Square on a Wednesday afternoon.
