Registered nurses, patients, and community allies mobilized in eight cities across the country on Thursday demanding hospitals and elected officials cut ties with the big tech firm Palantir.
The nationwide demonstrations, organized by National Nurses United, represent the union’s largest coordinated action against the company to date. Protests took place in Palo Alto, Calif.; Los Angeles; Chicago; Washington, D.C.; Portland, Maine; Asheville, N.C.; Austin, Texas; and New Orleans.
In Chicago, nurses and their allies rallied outside the Cook County Pension Board, where millions of dollars in nurses’ pension funds are invested in Palantir. Protesters blocked West Madison Street for about 15 minutes, chanting “No ICE, no war, no Palantir!”
“No part of the country has been untouched by the terror and violence of ICE and CBP, enabled by Palantir’s technology,” NNU President Jamie Brown said. “While nurses have had to witness the fear and desperation of our patients and neighbors facing the threat of immigration raids, we have also seen hospitals start to buckle under conditions of extreme scarcity.”
At the heart of the nurses’ concerns are Palantir’s dual roles in providing surveillance technology used by ICE to identify people for arrest and expanding its footprint in the healthcare industry through its contracts with hospital systems.
Palantir’s role in immigration enforcement
Palantir developed and operates ELITE, an application used by ICE agents to locate immigrants who could be subject to deportation. Internal memos obtained by the Associated Press show the Trump administration ordered the transfer of personal data on millions of Medicaid recipients to Homeland Security officials in July. The dataset included immigration status and was handed over despite objections from career civil servants.
The union said Palantir’s technology also enabled the detention of approximately 500 babies and more than 6,000 children by ICE and Customs and Border Protection since the second Trump term began.
Palantir’s federal government funding has grown tremendously in recent years. The company received $2.5 billion between 2009 and 2025, with billions more in new contracts awarded this year.
In February 2026, the Department of Homeland Security signed a five-year agreement with Palantir worth up to $1 billion, and the Department of Defense announced a $10 billion agreement with the corporation last July.
Palantir also has a partnership with Israel’s Ministry of Defense to support its ethnic cleansing effort in Gaza. More than 1,500 healthcare workers, in addition to many tens of thousands of civilians, mostly women and children, have been slaughtered in Gaza since October 2023.
Chicago protest draws broad labor solidarity
Elizabeth, a 15-year registered nurse at Cook County Hospital, told People’s World that pension dollars “should be invested in our communities, not be used for war.”
“Palantir is responsible for thousands of children disappearing into ICE detention centers as well as thousands of children killed in the genocide in Gaza,” she said. “Executives are rushing to use untested and unregulated technology to replace clinical judgment and make critical health care decisions, like how many nurses are on a unit to take care of patients on a shift.”
Pastor Worthington, a leader of the faith-based labor organization Arise, told People’s World he joined the demonstration because his faith compels him “to love his neighbor and to do everything possible to combat the dehumanization in this country and in Palestine.”
Vicky Kurzydlo, recording secretary of the Chicago Teachers Union, emphasized that educators must unite with nurses. “We both take care of people to ensure their well-being,” she said. “Palantir is the absolute opposite with their data mining without people’s permission to track down immigrants and more must be stopped.” She added that pension dollars could be used for education and healthcare, not ICE and war.
Husam Marajda, spokesperson for the Palestinian Community Network, told the crowd that the State of Illinois Pension Board had tripled its investment in Palantir since 2025. He called on those gathered to join a demonstration in front of their offices in Chicago on Sept. 28 at 10 a.m.
Other labor speakers included Theo Clifford of UE Local 1122, representing Northwestern University graduate workers, who spoke about how their union is under attack because of a deal signed by their administration which threatens foreign graduate students and members of their union. They were there to express solidarity with NNU against Trump and AI surveillance.
In a show of solidarity, Brannon, a Teamsters Local 700 member, brought several strikers who were picketing the Cook County Forest Preserve headquarters in a separate demonstration around the corner to the Palantir rally. Afterward, members of National Nurses United, Arise, and Jobs With Justice returned the gesture and joined the Teamsters’ strike line.
Other organizations present included the Peoples Lobby, Jobs with Justice, Southside Together, Office of Professional Employees Local 153, the American Friends Service Committee, Advocates for Justice, and the Chicago club of the Communist Party USA.
Palantir’s healthcare connection
On the healthcare front, the Trump administration has cut more than a trillion dollars in funding for Medicaid and Affordable Care Act subsidies, a move which now threatens health coverage for tens of thousands of people and risks closures and service cuts at more than 600 hospitals nationwide, according to the NNU. At the same time, Palantir’s technology is being introduced into patient care settings with little transparency or regulatory oversight.
Nashville-based HCA Healthcare, the nation’s largest for-profit hospital chain, relies on Palantir’s Timpani software to handle staffing schedules across more than 130 facilities and 1,200 nursing units.
While HCA claims the platform has cut scheduling time and contributed to a decline in nurse turnover, the NNU reports that the AI-enabled application creates “unsustainable and faulty schedules that ultimately perpetuate the national short-staffing crisis,” according to the union.
Other hospitals are also under scrutiny. MaineHealth has used Palantir since at least 2025 to streamline insurance communications, but the hospital system has refused to disclose the full scope of the arrangement or how it protects patient and employee data. Union nurses there have repeatedly pressed for answers to no avail.
“We have to resist a future where tech billionaires control our politics and our public resources,” Brown said. “Otherwise, we will see fewer and fewer resources for working people—for our health care, for our education, for our housing.”
The company’s increasingly toxic reputation has already begun to cut into its business, with some clients pulling back amid rising public pressure. But the company continues to benefit from its close relationship with the Trump administration and from the hospital industry’s rush to adopt AI tools.
“We don’t want our lives to be run by these large corporations that are here to scare people and to threaten people,” said Andrew Gesler, a nurse at Maine Medical Center. “I’m here as a healer, as a nurse. That’s my mission in life, and Palantir technologies gets in the way of that.”
Nurses and their supporters can sign the National Nurses United petition here, demanding Palantir out of our hospitals.
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