Anna wept as she told members of the New Jersey Investment Council why she wanted them to get rid of the state’s holding in surveillance company Palantir Technologies. Speaking in Spanish via Zoom on Wednesday morning, the 25-year resident of New Jersey said she was just one among millions of people across the United States “terrified about the future” and living with the knowledge that Trump’s immigration terror campaign has the power to watch her every move.
Like the two dozen others who spoke at the regular council meeting, Anna urged council members to reconsider the state’s $130.9 million investment in Palantir, the Denver-based software behemoth founded by Peter Thiel that, among other things, develops tools for Immigration and Customs Enforcement and Customs and Border Protection to assist President Trump’s goal of deporting one million people annually.
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Tellingly named for the crystal balls evil forces use to monitor the good guys in J.R.R. Tolkien’s The Lord of the Rings, Palantir has received nearly $100 million worth of ICE contracts since last January, including a $30 million contract through next year for ImmigrationOS, an artificial intelligence platform used to “track immigrants’ movements.” It also developed a program for ICE called ELITE, which likewise enables the government’s search for people to deport.
“We don’t deserve to be tracked like animals,” Anna said through tears. “We all deserve respect and dignity. We are a state of immigrants. Our communities are frightened, our people are afraid to go outside.”
The meeting reflected Americans’ growing anger over Trump’s federal agents, who have moved throughout the country, snatching, beating, and killing people, especially Black and Latino people; the recent execution of two white people has drawn the most press coverage. Trump’s immigration agents have murdered or caused the death of eight people since July 2025; they’ve shot and injured nine more, though the total number of people agents have hurt is unknown. The Prospect is maintaining a database with a running count of the minimum number of people immigration agents have maimed and killed.
“Our investment here in New Jersey is allowing for the terror in Minnesota,” Nedia Morsy, director of Make the Road New Jersey, said in an interview before the hearing. “We want to make sure we are not forgetting the conversation about the data infrastructure, the backbone, that holds up ICE … The state should not be giving one dollar to Palantir.”
A look at the underlying investments in New Jersey’s pension fund shows multiple firms involved in Trump’s mass deportation campaign, including GEO Group.
Besides protesting in the street, organizing and delivering mutual aid, and demanding lawmakers do their jobs, the resistance is also taking aim at deportation profiteers’ wallets. They’ve taken action against Delta Air Lines, Enterprise, Hilton, Home Depot, and Target in the days leading up to Minneapolis’s general strike on January 23. Before that, organizers successfully pressured Avelo Airlines to halt its ICE deportation charters, a deal that was financially beneficial “but placed us in the center of a political controversy,” CEO Andrew Levy said in an email to employees, according to CNBC.
Iñupiat shareholders of the for-profit Alaska Native corporation NANA are organizing to force the company to end its subsidiary’s contracts to operate ICE prisons in Guantanamo Bay and Florida. Shareholders are likewise demanding Bering Straits Native Corporation end its contracts with DHS and ICE.
In Maine, where Trump’s federal agents have ramped up their ethnic-cleansing campaign, state Rep. Rafael Leo Macias (D-Topsham) proposed a bill earlier this month that would jettison Palantir and other ICE profiteers from the state’s $21 billion public pension investment fund, using different reasoning. The bill would force MainePERS to divest from any company associated with perpetrators of international human rights violations, ethnic cleansing, genocide, and war crimes, which would include Palantir and other government defense contractors and weapons manufacturers, including Boeing and Signature Aviation. Testimony for the bill went on for hours.
And the same day New Jerseyans spoke against the state’s investment in Palantir, Tennesseans in Hamilton County urged the sheriff’s department to end its agreement to assist ICE, also using a financial argument. Why should local taxpayers bear the burden of federal immigration enforcement? “This agreement shifts federal immigration enforcement onto local taxpayers with no meaningful reimbursement, and that’s why I’ve come to [the] county commission today,” they said. “We elected you to be the stewards of our financial resources.”
In New Jersey, many speakers described their objection to the state’s investment in moral terms, telling the council members with passion that investing in any company related to mass deportations was unacceptable. Historian Myles Drake Zhang told committee members he was dissatisfied and angry about the state’s investment in Palantir and other defense industries, and said that determining investments based only on whether they are highly profitable at the moment puts the council on the wrong side of history. The most profitable companies in 1930 Germany, for example, were in the German rail industry, responsible for transporting Jews and other Holocaust victims to their death, and chemical company I.G. Farbenindustrie AG, which manufactured Zyklon B, among its other activities to support Hitler’s genocide.
Based on their silence on Palantir, “you would have been silent in the Holocaust,” Zhang told council members. “Think about that.”
Dr. Britt Paris, tenured professor of library and information science at Rutgers, also spoke with passion, saying that she and her fellow teachers’ union members don’t want their pension invested in companies that target immigrants. She noted that Palantir CEO Alex Karp has gleefully proclaimed how much he’s enjoying carrying out mass deportation, saying that there may be the need to “kill” for it, as he did when he spoke last February: “Palantir is here to disrupt,” he said. “And, when it’s necessary, to scare our enemies and, on occasion, kill them.”
Another speaker brought a different approach, arguing that an investment in a company like Palantir betrayed the council’s fiduciary duty because of its risk profile. Aly Azhar, New Jersey state lead for Emgage Action, listed concentration risk, given that the company’s revenue is heavily tied to factors outside its control, such as government contracts; dual-class voting risk, which weakens the council’s ability to influence the company; reputational and regulatory risk; and the sharp financial swings that present fair valuation and volatility risk.
In an interview after the hearing, Azhar noted that he took a different approach than other speakers because he knew that others would cover the moral and humanitarian arguments. He does not have a finance background, but educated himself about investment principles, Palantir’s corporate profile, and how the company makes money.
“At the end of the day, I know that this investment council has a fiduciary responsibility, and I’m not sure how much the moral argument is effective with some of these people,” given that they come from the world of finance, he told the Prospect. “I wanted to try to show, hey, Palantir is a risky investment for xyz reasons.”
For activists who want to do the same, he suggested getting familiar with what Palantir CEO Karp says in conferences, public speeches, op-eds, and the like. If this interview with The New York Times’ Dealbook is any indication, he is unstable at best. “It’s important to know your adversary and what they want to do,” Azhar said.
Investment council members did not respond on the number of speakers or their concerns, though council chair Deepak Raj thanked the group for “relaying your point of view to us.”
“I don’t have a response to that, right away,” he said, “but we will definitely think about what you’ve said.”
A look at the underlying investments in New Jersey’s pension fund shows multiple firms involved in Trump’s mass deportation campaign, including GEO Group, ICE’s largest contractor, which runs dozens of immigrant prisons across the country.
Others include data storage government contractor Iron Mountain, which among other contracts has an agreement to shred documents for the Department of Homeland Security, and CACI International, which holds numerous ICE contracts. In 2024, a jury found that CACI shared liability with the U.S. Army for torturing three Iraqi men held in Abu Ghraib prison and forced executives to pay the men $42 million. The lawsuit took 15 years. CACI executives tried to get it thrown out 20 times.