who is palantir, and why are they involved with ICE?
kill switch
Kaleidoscope
4.7 • 635 Ratings
🗓️ 11 March 2026
⏱️ 37 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
Do you know what Palantir does? Don’t feel bad: neither do a lot of their employees. In fact, WIRED senior writer Makena Kelly recently uncovered company chat logs showing how angry and confused Palantir workers are about the company’s involvement with ICE. Dexter talks to Makena about this new reporting, what exactly the company is providing ICE, and how the company creates mystery behind everything from Partiful rumors to skyrocketing stock price.
Got something you’re curious about? Hit us up killswitch@kaleidoscope.nyc, or @killswitchpod, or @dexdigi on IG or Bluesky.
Read + Watch:
- Makena’s reporting about Palantir employees: https://www.wired.com/story/palantir-ice-dhs-alex-pretti-killing-workers-slack-minneapolis/
- 404 Media’s zine on ICE: https://www.404media.co/icezine/
- kill switch on YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/@killswitch_pod
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Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | This is an I-Heart podcast. |
| 0:02.5 | Guaranteed human. |
| 0:14.4 | Palliator is here to disrupt and make our institutions we partner with the very best in the world and when it's |
| 0:22.4 | necessary to scare enemies and on occasion kill them. That was a recording from 24 of Alex Karp, |
| 0:29.7 | who's the CEO of a tech company called Palantir. And we'll come back to that clip later. |
| 0:34.2 | But just who are these enemies that his company wants to scare and on occasion |
| 0:39.6 | kill? And also, what are the institutions that Palantir is partnering with to make that happen? |
| 0:45.7 | That last question has a lot of answers. But the most infamous one right now would be immigration |
| 0:51.1 | and customs enforcement. Better known is ICE. Ice has a lot of new toys |
| 0:57.6 | under the recent Trump administration. But the biggest tools that I've been paying attention to |
| 1:03.4 | is how Palantir is working with ICE in the federal government to create new apps and systems |
| 1:10.2 | to track people. |
| 1:11.5 | Mechanic Kelly is a senior politics writer at Wired, and recently she's been reporting on |
| 1:15.7 | ICE's activity, and in particular, how it's being powered by technology from Palantir. |
| 1:21.1 | So there's the work itself that Palantir is doing, and then the pressure inside among |
| 1:25.5 | people who maybe work on defense contracts or work on more |
| 1:28.7 | commercial things that are like, oh, the tool I'm building is doing this too? |
| 1:33.1 | I don't like this and like demanding more information. |
| 1:36.4 | Palantir has been around since the early 2000s and they used to keep their work pretty quiet, |
| 1:41.0 | but they're starting to flex a lot more publicly. |
| 1:44.1 | Still, most people don't know what they actually do. |
| 1:47.7 | Even inside the company, their own employees seem to not always know what's actually going on. |
... |
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