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trump administration
Ex-Democratic Sen. Jon Tester Joins Palantir as Tech Giant Faces Probe for Helping Trump’s Deportation Campaign
Palantir, co-founded by the billionaire right-wing megadonor Peter Thiel, has received tens of millions of dollars in federal contracts supporting President Donald Trump's “mass deportation” campaign during his second term. The company has developed technology that has been used to identify and track immigrants targeted for removal and has reportedly helped federal agencies integrate vast troves of Americans’ personal data—raising concerns among civil rights groups about violations of privacy.
After Trump returned to office in January 2025, Palantir's leadership aggressively courted his administration. The company's CEO, Alex Karp, who had supported Kamala Harris over Trump in the presidential election, gave $1 million to Trump's inauguration fund before pivoting to praise the president's immigration policies and declare his company “completely anti-woke.” Palantir donated an additional $10 million to Trump's White House ballroom project. Meanwhile, company co-founder Joe Lonsdale has been one of the leading backers of the administration's second-term efforts to criminalize homelessness.
This has drawn the ire of Democrats in Congress, who have vowed to put Palantir's practices under the microscope when they take control of investigative committees beginning in January.
Sen. Ron Wyden (D-Ore.), who will chair the powerful Senate Finance Committee, has threatened to use compulsory investigative powers if Palantir refuses to answer questions about its role in Trump's immigration enforcement and handling of Americans' personal information. Other Democrats have suggested looking into conflicts of interest between the company and the administration.
Stephen Miller, the architect of Trump’s mass deportation policy, who was appointed White House chief of staff last week, for instance, has disclosed that he sold up to $250,000 worth of Palantir stock last summer. Several former Palantir employees have been appointed to powerful government positions. Thiel helped to finance the political rise of Vice President JD Vance.
Protesters gather in the lobby of 9200 Sunset in Los Angeles on June 13, 2025, to protest Palantir's work with US Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE). (Photo by Madison Swart/Hans Lucas/AFP via Getty Images)
Tester, a vocal critic of the PATRIOT Act and the resulting expansion of government surveillance, told NPR that Palantir's problem was, more than anything, one of "perception."
"Perception is reality in Washington, DC, and in politics in general," said Tester. "But the fact is, I think Palantir has got a good story to tell, and they need to tell it. And hopefully folks will be receptive to it."
Tester said he does not share the fears that many others hold about his new employer: "I've talked to many people within Palantir. They believe the same way I do," he said. "This is an organization that believes in privacy."
He said Palantir was different from other companies because it does not build “big databases.” Though the company maintains that it does not itself collect or own the personal data processed by its software, it specializes in building systems that consolidate, store, cross-reference, and analyze vast amounts of data from different sources.
US Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE), for instance, has used a Palantir-developed application called ELITE that combines address data from federal health records, immigration records, commercial databases, and criminal records to map potential targets for immigration raids. Shortly before the midterms, Democracy Docket revealed that ICE had tried to add voter information from at least six states to the platform.
Last month, a WIRED investigation revealed how federal agents assembled dossiers on activists observing immigration enforcement operations in Maine using Palantir's Investigative Case Management system to store information about them—including license plate data and facial recognition information.
During his time in Congress, Tester also criticized lobbyists’ influence over Congress, even while receiving more donations from lobbyists than any other lawmaker in the 2012 and 2018 election cycles.
David Sirota, founder and editor-in-chief of The Lever, said that for the former senator, the transition from surveillance critic to Palantir adviser was quite “on-brand.”
Pollster Adam Carlson described it as "just about the grossest way he could end his career."
"I can count on one hand companies that are more evil and have caused more direct human suffering than Palantir," Carlson said. "And these kinds of revolving door antics make the public even more jaded and distrustful of their elected officials."
Tester has said he would not be acting as a “lobbyist” for Palantir but would instead merely be helping it to navigate its relations with the incoming Congress, using his nearly two decades of insider experience.
Tester is not the first former Democratic lawmaker to take a role advising an industry that has drawn criticism from within the party.
Recent examples include former Sen. Kyrsten Sinema (I-Ariz.), a one-time Democrat who joined Coinbase's advisory council and helped launch an artificial intelligence industry advocacy group, and former Sen. Heidi Heitkamp (D-ND), who joined a fossil fuel industry-funded influence campaign to promote natural gas as part of a clean energy transition.
Melanie D'Arrigo, the executive director of the New York Health Campaign, said Tester's journey to the private sector was an example of this “politician to lobbyist pipeline.”
Trump Weighing Executive Order to Label Disliked Nonprofits as ‘Terrorist’ Groups: Report
According to the report, the administration is seeking to use a little-known provision in the federal tax code to strip nonprofits of their status without going through the normal Internal Revenue Service investigation and appeals process.
The law, signed in 2003 by then-President George W. Bush, allows the president to identify an organization in an executive order as supporting or engaging in terrorism. The law also prevents organizations from challenging designation or suspension in proceedings concerning federal tax liability.
It’s not clear yet which groups will be targeted, but the administration and its allies in Congress have already signaled their intent to go after left-leaning groups like George Soros’ Open Society Foundations, the Southern Poverty Law Center (SPLC), and the Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR).
The latter was forced to cease operations in Florida Thursday following a state-level "terrorism" designation by Republican Gov. Ron DeSantis.
In September 2025, weeks after the assassination of right-wing activist Charlie Kirk, Trump signed National Security Presidential Memorandum 7 (NSPM-7), which identified “anti-capitalism,” “anti-Christianity,” “extremism on migration, race, and gender,” and “hostility towards those who hold traditional American views on family, religion, and morality” as ideological characteristics associated with “domestic terrorism.”
The memo directed the IRS and other federal agencies to investigate nonprofits and their funders for alleged connections to political violence.
Shanna Singh Hughey, a policy strategist at the anti-authoritarian watchdog group Protect Democracy, said in September that the memo's vague and subjective language gave the administration expansive powers to target the nonprofits of its political foes.
“It goes way beyond that to the organizations that are connected to the folks who might be accused [of violence], including board members and staff, as long as that organization is accused of either funding or facilitating the violence done by the target," she told Inside Philanthropy.
“This is exactly what we expect to see when authoritarians attempt to consolidate and hold power,” she said. “There are entities that seek to hold the government accountable, and so the government uses the tools in its toolkit to try to silence them.”
Then-White House Deputy Chief of Staff and Homeland Security Advisor Stephen Miller speaks during an event with US President Donald Trump in the Oval Office of the White House on August 6, 2026, in Washington, DC. (Photo by Alex Wong/Getty Images)
Trump's reported plan to attack nonprofits comes on the same day that he named Stephen Miller, the chief architect of NSPM-7, as his new White House chief of staff.
Weeks before the memo was signed, Miller vowed to "dismantle and take on the radical left organizations in this country that are fomenting violence." He has said that descriptions of Trump and his immigration policies as "authoritarian" or "fascist" were examples of language that "incites" violence.
He has also referred to the Democratic Party itself as "not a political party," but "a domestic extremist organization."
During a State Department ministerial on terrorism in July, Miller said that under NSPM-7, the administration was empowered to “disrupt, identify, defund, debank, arrest, and prosecute” what it called terrorist organizations.
In the same speech, he claimed that left-wing extremists invoke "civil liberties" disingenuously to evade criminal punishment.
Describing leftists as the "enemies of civilization," he said, "It is essential that we are wise enough and strong enough to understand that these appeals must fall on deaf ears."
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