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Palantir Technologies Contracts Raise Human Rights Concerns Before NYSE Direct Listing
WASHINGTON
In advance of the direct listing of Palantir Technologies, Inc. on the New York Stock Exchange on September 29, Amnesty International released today a new briefing, Failing to Do Right: The Urgent Need for Palantir to Respect Human Rights, where the organization concludes that Palantir is failing to conduct human rights due diligence around its contracts with ICE, and that there is a high risk that Palantir is contributing to human rights violations of asylum-seekers and migrants through the ways the company's technology facilitates ICE operations.
Michael Kleinman, the Director of Amnesty International's Silicon Valley Initiative said:
"Palantir touts its ethical commitments, saying it will never work with regimes that abuse human rights abroad. This is deeply ironic, given the company's willingness stateside to work directly with ICE, which has used its technology to execute harmful policies that target migrants and asylum-seekers."
"We could close our eyes and pretend that contrary to all the evidence, Palantir is a rights-respecting company or we can call this facade what it is: another company placing profit over people, no matter the human cost."
On September 10, Amnesty International sent a letter to Palantir raising concerns about its contracts with the U.S. Department of Homeland Security (DHS) for products and services for Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE). In its response, Palantir emphasized that its contracts are only with the criminal investigative division of ICE, called Homeland Security Investigations (HSI), and as such its software "does not facilitate" civil immigration enforcement by ICE's Enforcement and Removal Operations (ERO) unit. However, this claim is inconsistent with other evidence indicating that Palantir's technology has indeed been used in this context, including U.S. government records which the company now disputes.
Instead of substantively addressing the human rights risks of its contracts with ICE, Palantir has sought to deflect and minimize its responsibility. Moreover, the company has not provided evidence of due diligence steps it has taken to prevent its technology being used to facilitate human rights violations by ICE.
In 2017, ICE relied on Palantir technology to arrest parents and caregivers of unaccompanied children, leading to detentions and harming children's welfare. Similarly, ICE has used Palantir technology to plan mass raids, as with raids that ICE carried out in Mississippi in August 2019, which led to the separation of children from their parents and caregivers, causing irreparable harm to families and communities. These raids in turn led to cases of prolonged detention and deportations. Palantir's ICM and FALCON technology facilitated these operations by enabling DHS/ICE to identify, share information on, investigate, and track migrants and asylum-seekers to effect arrests and workplace raids.
Transparency is a key component of due diligence and in failing to provide details on how it has addressed the high risks to human rights of its ICE contracts, Palantir is not meeting its responsibility to respect human rights. Amnesty International is calling on the company to prevent its technology from being used to facilitate human rights violations. Palantir must immediately carry out human rights due diligence and take effective steps to ensure that its technology is not contributing to abuses against migrants and asylum-seekers by the U.S. government. As part of this due diligence, Palantir must publish details of the technology it has provided to ICE through its contracts, and the human rights safeguards it has put in place. Until Palantir can demonstrate that its technology is not contributing to abuses against migrants and asylum-seekers and can ensure its technology will not be used for these purposes, it must urgently consider suspending all activities to provide DHS/ICE with products and services that facilitate civil immigration enforcement operations.
Amnesty International is also calling on Congress to conduct robust oversight over Palantir's contracts with U.S. government agencies, including DHS and the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS).
Background and context
Amnesty International's own research has documented the human rights violations against migrants and asylum-seekers under DHS and ICE through punitive restrictions on access to asylum, illegal family separations, mandatory and indefinite detention, including of children, and the return of people to countries where they face serious human rights violations, and unlawful policies authorizing deportations. ICE's use of Palantir's technology in its operations executing harmful policies against migrants and asylum-seekers drew the human rights organizations to raise its concerns with the company. Palantir's ICM and FALCON technology facilitated these operations by enabling DHS/ICE to identify, share information on, investigate, and track migrants and asylum-seekers to effect arrests and workplace raids, which in turn led to family separations, detentions, and deportations.
While this briefing focuses on Palantir, all companies have a responsibility to respect human rights throughout their operations. An assessment of a company's actions to uphold its responsibility to respect human rights is a case-by-case determination taking into account the company, the nature of its operations, and the environment in which it is operating. Exposing Palantir's failure to conduct due diligence and its high risk of contributing to human right violations through its contracts for DHS/ICE for ICM and FALCON, should remind all companies to conduct human rights due diligence in their operations with DHS/ICE.
This release and the briefing are available at: https://www.amnestyusa.org/press-releases/palantirs-contracts-with-ice-raise-human-rights-concerns-around-direct-listing/
Follow @amnestyusa on Twitter, Instagram @amnestyusa, and Facebook FB.com/amnestyusa.
Amnesty International is a global movement of millions of people demanding human rights for all people - no matter who they are or where they are. We are the world's largest grassroots human rights organization.
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'Things Are Not Okay': US Threatens to Withhold HIV Funding Unless Zambia Allows Plunder of Its Minerals
"The State Department is threatening Zambia with an embargo on essential medicines in order to plunder its minerals," said one HIV prevention advocate.
Mar 17, 2026
The US State Department is threatening to strip HIV/AIDS and other disease prevention funds for more than a million people in the African nation of Zambia in a bid to extort the country for greater access to its mineral wealth.
The New York Times reported Monday on the draft of a memo prepared for Secretary of State Marco Rubio, which states that "we will only secure our priorities by demonstrating willingness to publicly take support away from Zambia on a massive scale."
The Trump administration is considering whether to "significantly cut assistance" from the President’s Emergency Plan for AIDS Relief (PEPFAR), which provides daily HIV treatment to around 1.3 million Zambians and other funds for tuberculosis and malaria medications that save tens of thousands of lives each year.
At the time that PEPFAR was created, under the administration of President George W. Bush, HIV was killing around 90,000 people per year in Zambia. That number had been reduced to 16,000 in 2024, according to data from the Joint United Nations Program on HIV/AIDS (UNAIDS).
"Things are not okay," said Justin Wolfers, an economics professor at the University of Michigan and a Brookings Institution fellow.
Threats to cut PEPFAR are part of a broader push by the Trump administration to wield desperately needed foreign medical aid as a tool of coercion against impoverished nations, whose health systems have been thrown into turmoil by the Trump administration's massive cuts to the US Agency for International Development (USAID) last year.
According to the Times, 24 African nations have signed memoranda of understanding (MOU) under the Trump administration's so-called "America First Global Health Strategy" in order to unlock some US funding that has been cut.
Many of the deals require nations to increase their own health spending in order to restore just a fraction of what the US previously provided:
"According to an analysis by the nonprofit Partners in Health, health funding under the agreements would drop by 69% to Rwanda, 61% to Madagascar, 42% to Liberia, and 34% to Eswatini, where a quarter of adults live with HIV," the Times reported in January.
Meanwhile, the deals have come with other, often ideological, strings attached. Kenya's memorandum requires it to provide data guaranteeing that no funding is being used for abortion care, and to direct funds to certain Christian faith-based providers, even though they refuse services like HIV care to LGBTQ+ people.
Nigeria's agreement likewise requires more than $200 million to over 900 Christian faith-based healthcare facilities across the country and emphasizes protecting Christian victims of violence from the Islamist group Boko Haram, even though the majority of the group's victims are Muslim.
Some countries have rejected the deals, calling them one-sided and exploitative. Last month, Zimbabwe walked away from a deal that would have provided $367 million over five years because it required the country to give the US unfettered access to citizens' health data and biological samples.
The deal offered to Zambia is similar to those offered to other countries in that it requires the government to commit $340 million in health spending in exchange for $1 billion from the US over five years, less than half of what it received under previous US administrations. It also demands that Zambia provide citizens' health data to the US for 10 years, longer than the deals agreed to by other nations.
But the deal also stipulates that, to receive any funding, Zambia must provide US corporations with easier access to the nation's vast mineral wealth.
Zambia has some of the world's largest reserves of minerals such as copper, lithium, and cobalt, which are essential to green energy technology. The Trump administration says the country has given China greater access to its mines than it has given to the US.
Zambia would also be required to share mining databases with US experts and renegotiate a massive 2024 contract with the Millennium Challenge Corporation, a US-based foreign assistance agency, to reduce mining regulations.
After the terms of the deal leaked to The Guardian last month, Asia Russell, director of the HIV advocacy organisation Health GAP, derided it as a proposal for the "shameless exploitation" of Zambia.
In February, Zambia rejected the deal, with a spokesperson for the Ministry of Health saying it "did not align with the position and interests of Zambia."
Now the Trump administration is using HIV treatment funding in an effort to force its leaders back to the table and make an example of them for other countries that may seek to go their own way.
The memo describes threats to AIDS funding as a way to demonstrate the "use of sticks" to other countries with which it seeks to negotiate.
If Zambia refuses to sign, it says, “sharp public cuts to American foreign assistance would significantly demonstrate to aid-receiving countries the seriousness of our interest in collaboration and our insistence on tangible benefits under our America First foreign policy."
Zambia has already been stripped of more than half its annual PEPFAR funding from the US since the Trump administration returned to power last year through a combination of foreign aid freezes, rescissions, and budget cuts that stripped billions from the program.
A survey of 76 HIV clinics across 32 mostly African countries that received PEPFAR funds, conducted by the International Epidemiology Databases to Evaluate AIDS (IeDEA) consortium, found that, as a result of cuts, many experienced disruptions to testing and treatment, including drug shortages and staff layoffs.
Citing modeling studies, the researchers estimated that funding disruptions to PEPFAR just last year "resulted in more than 120,000 deaths by November 2025, including more than 13,000 child deaths."
Another study by Imperial College London predicted that just the three-month disruption at the beginning of President Donald Trump's second term would result in more than 37,400 excess deaths by 2060.
In a statement posted to social media on Monday, Republicans on the House Foreign Affairs Committee defended the threats to cut PEPFAR, saying that "Just like every other country, Zambia is free to walk away from these negotiations." The REpublicans said it was "ridiculous to assume the United States should fund entire health systems for countries that turn around and give priority access to critical supply chains to China."
Russell said that "the State Department is threatening Zambia with an embargo on essential medicines in order to plunder its minerals."
While she said "Zambia’s MOU text is the first we know of that explicitly ties exploitation of mineral wealth," she noted that similar "exploitative conditions" are reportedly part of other nations' memoranda as well, but that information is scarce because they have been "negotiated in secret" and texts have not been made public.
Julius Kachidza, the chair of Zambia’s Civil Society Self-Coordinating Mechanism, said that yet another massive cut in US government funding “would be apocalyptic. It could be quite a disaster, especially to me. And the majority of people living with HIV in Zambia.”
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"I cannot support sending the next generation off to fight and die in a war that serves no benefit to the American people," the far-right former Army Ranger and CIA officer said.
Mar 17, 2026
National Counterterrorism Center Director Joe Kent announced his resignation Tuesday, accusing President Donald Trump of being manipulated by Israel into launching a war on Iran.
"I cannot in good conscience support the ongoing war in Iran. Iran posed no imminent threat to our nation, and it is clear that we started this war due to pressure from Israel and its powerful American lobby," Kent—a former Army Ranger and CIA paramilitary officer often described as a white nationalist and conspiracy theorist—wrote in his resignation letter to Trump.
"Early in this administration, high-ranking Israeli officials and influential members of the American media deployed a misinformation campaign that wholly undermined your America First platform and sowed pro-war sentiments to encourage war with Iran," Kent continued. "This echo chamber was used to deceive you into believing that Iran posed an imminent threat to the United States, and that should you strike now, there was a clear path to a swift victory."
"This was a lie and is the same tactic the Israelis used to draw us into the disastrous Iraq War that cost our nation the lives of thousands of our best men and women," he claimed.
While there is no solid evidence that Israel "drew" the US under then-President George W. Bush into invading Iraq and toppling longtime dictator and erstwhile US ally Saddam Hussein, then-Israeli opposition leader Minister Benjamin Netanyahu said in 2008 that the September 11, 2001 attacks on the United States—which Iraq had nothing to do with—were "benefiting" Israel. He also said two years later that "America is a thing you can move very easily, move it in the right direction."
Kent, whose first wife, Navy intelligence officer Shannon Smith, was killed in a 2019 bombing targeting US forces invading Syria, said that "I cannot support sending the next generation off to fight and die in a war that serves no benefit to the American people nor justifies the cost of American lives," said
"I pray that you will reflect upon what we are doing in Iran, and who we are doing it for," he told the president.
Kent—who has been a staunch Trump loyalist—is the most prominent US official to resign as the president, who infamously campaigned for reelection on a promise of no new wars, has attacked seven countries since returning to the White House and 10 over the course of his two terms.
In contrast to his vehement opposition to waging war on Iran, Kent led an effort to rewrite intelligence so that it did not clash with Trump's dubious claim that the government of Venezuela was involved with the Tren de Aragua drug trafficking gang ahead of the recent US invasion of the South American country and kidnapping of its president, Nicolás Maduro.
While Kent's resignation drew praise from many opponents of Trump and the illegal US-Israeli war of choice in Iran, others focused on his troubling record and associations.
Iran war was a bad idea from start. But Joe Kent is not the right messenger on this. See his alleged associations with Nick Fuentes and live streamer who said Hitler was “a complicated historical figure which many people misunderstand” @splcenter.org @westernstatescenter.org 2025 letter:
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— Ryan Goodman (@rgoodlaw.bsky.social) March 17, 2026 at 7:25 AM
"Joe Kent isn't suddenly a good guy," former Republican Congressman Adam Kinzinger (R-Ill.) said on X. "He's a straight-up white nationalist. But there are fissures in the MAGA base."
MeidasTouch News CEO Ron Filipowski also took to social media, writing, "Just for the record, I'm glad Joe Kent resigned but he is still a POS."
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"Our data on the USA goes back to 1789. What we're seeing now is the most severe magnitude of democratic backsliding ever in the country."
Mar 17, 2026
A report released on Tuesday by the V-Dem Institute at the University of Gothenburg in Sweden has found that President Donald Trump and his administration are dismantling democracy in the US at a speed that "is unprecedented in modern history."
In its report, V-Dem categorizes the first year of Trump's second term as "a rapid and aggressive concentration of powers in the presidency."
In fact, V-Dem says that the Trump administration has accomplished in just one year what most budding autocracies take a decade to achieve, adding that "the speed of decline is comparable to some coups d´état."
Of particular concern is the failure of the legislative branch of the US government to apply any kind of oversight or check upon the executive branch, the report explains.
"The Republican-controlled Congress seems to have abdicated its constitutional role in favor of the executive branch, ceding significant legislative, fiscal, and oversight powers during 2025," the report says. "The Trump administration has de facto repeatedly taken over the Congressional 'power of the purse'—enshrined in the Constitution and in the 1974 Impoundment Control Act—unilaterally cancelling or reallocating federal funding."
The report also points fingers at the US Senate for repeatedly rolling over and confirming unqualified Trump nominees, which it says is tantamount to letting the White House “sideline” the upper chamber’s authority altogether.
V-Dem goes on to document the administration's repeated assaults on the judicial branch and the rule of law in general during his second term, starting when Trump issued a mass pardon to more than 1,500 alleged or convicted criminals who stormed the US Capitol on January 6, 2021.
Since then, the administration has waged a pressure campaign against judges who rule against it consisting of "impeachment resolutions and misconduct complaints," while also using executive orders to punish major law firms simply for representing the president's political enemies in court.
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"Actions taken in 2025 raise concerns regarding the integrity of the 2026 midterms," the report warns. "This primarily concerns attempts to assert federal control over election processes, which must be decentralized and state-run, according to the Constitution."
The report notes that Trump has issued an executive order that attempts to override states' election laws by restricting mail-in voting and mandating voter IDs at polling places nationwide, but adds that "many provisions of this order have been blocked and others are still being challenged in federal court."
In an interview with The Guardian, V-Dem founder Staffan Lindberg used historical context to explain why Trump's assault on US democracy is truly without precedent.
"Our data on the USA goes back to 1789," he said. "What we’re seeing now is the most severe magnitude of democratic backsliding ever in the country."
He also said that other authoritarian leaders have taken much more time in ripping down their states' democratic institutions than Trump has.
"For Orbán in Hungary, it took about four years," Lindberg said, "for Vučić in Serbia, it took eight years, and for Erdoğan in Turkey and Modi in India, it took about 10 years to accomplish the suppression of democratic institutions that Trump has achieved in only one year."
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