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Palantir exec defends company’s immigration surveillance work
One of the founders of startup accelerator Y Combinator offered unsparing criticism this weekend of the controversial data analytics company Palantir,
The back-and-forth came after federal filings showed that U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) — tasked with carrying out the Trump administration’s aggressive deportation strategy — is paying Palantir $30 million to create what it’s calling the Immigration Lifecycle Operating System, or ImmigrationOS, to help ICE decide who to target for deportation, as well as offering “near real-time visibility” into self-deportations. “But I’m hoping that if they [make the commitment], and some Palantir employee is one day asked to do something illegal, he’ll say ‘I didn’t sign up for this’ and refuse,” Graham wrote. Mabrey in turn compared Graham’s question to “the ‘will you promise to stop beating your wife’ court room parlor trick,” but he added that the company has “made this promise so many ways from Sunday,” starting with a commitment to “the 3500 enormously thoughtful people who are grinding only because they believe they are making the world a better place every single day as they see first hand what we are actually doing.”
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