The Company That Got Kicked Out of Denver Just Moved to Miami

And it's the same company building the AI that deports your neighbors.

February 19, 2026 — Rolando

The Company That Got Kicked Out of Denver Just Moved to Miami
TLDR: Palantir is a $313 billion surveillance company that builds the AI tools ICE uses to deport people, secretly embedded police tracking software in cities like New Orleans and Los Angeles without telling the public, and is actively powering Israeli military operations in Gaza. Their co-founder Peter Thiel thinks democracy is the problem, has spent millions getting his people into the White House, and owns mansions four miles from Little Havana. Denver organized against them for months and made them leave. They just moved to Miami, the most immigrant-dense major county in the United States, and announced it in a single sentence on X.

Most people have never heard of Palantir Technologies, which is exactly how the company prefers it.

Palantir is a data surveillance company worth $313 billion. It was co-founded by Peter Thiel, the PayPal billionaire who owns a mansion on Miami Beach's Venetian Islands and who once wrote, in a published essay, that "freedom and democracy are incompatible." The company's entire business model is selling powerful software to governments so they can track, profile, and target people. Their biggest clients are the CIA, the FBI, the NSA, the Pentagon, and ICE.

On February 17, 2026, Palantir published a single sentence on X: "We have moved our headquarters to Miami, Florida." Colorado's Governor learned about it the same way the public did, by reading the post. The company had been headquartered in Denver since 2020 and left without giving advance notice to elected officials, holding any press conference, or making any public statement beyond those eight words.

What Palantir also declined to mention is why they really left: the people of Denver spent months making their presence in the city untenable, and it worked.

What Palantir's ICE Contracts Actually Do

Palantir builds and operates the technology that ICE uses to find, track, and deport undocumented immigrants. Their primary ICE tool is called ICM, which stands for Investigative Case Management. It is a massive database that connects everything about a person: immigration records, IRS tax filings, Social Security information, school records, license plate scans, cellphone location data, DMV records, flight manifests, credit reports, and commercial data covering more than seven billion license plate detections. An ICE agent can type someone's name and receive their home address, email accounts, vehicles, photographs, family members, coworkers, and a map of everywhere they have been. ICE calls this system "mission critical" and more than 10,000 agents use it simultaneously.

In August 2019, Palantir's tools powered one of the largest workplace raids in ICE history. Agents descended on seven chicken processing plants in Mississippi and arrested 680 people in a single day. Children who were starting their first day of school came home to find both parents gone. At least two children were left alone for eight days.

The system has expanded significantly since then. In April 2025, ICE paid Palantir $30 million to build something new called ImmigrationOS. It has three functions: identifying targets for deportation, tracking people who are self-deporting in near-real time, and streamlining the entire process from identification to removal. A few months later, ICE added another $29.9 million contract for a tool called ELITE, which populates maps with deportation targets sorted by neighborhood, generates individual dossiers with photos and identification numbers, and assigns each person an address confidence score out of 100.

ELITE sources those addresses partly from Medicaid records. The health insurance you signed up for to take care of your family is feeding a database that ICE uses to find you.

Miami-Dade County has 2.7 million residents. Fifty-four percent of them were born outside the United States, the highest percentage of any major county in the country. The company that built the deportation machine just made this city its home.

How Palantir Built a Surveillance Infrastructure Inside Local Police Departments

Palantir's reach extends well beyond federal immigration enforcement, and it has been building relationships with local police departments for nearly two decades.

The Los Angeles Police Department began using Palantir in 2007 after the department's chief persuaded a private donor to pay $200,000 to bring the software in, bypassing the public procurement process entirely. By 2016, nearly 5,000 LAPD officers, more than half the force, had Palantir accounts. The department ran a program called Operation LASER that used Palantir to assign risk scores to individuals based on their neighborhood, arrest history, and social connections. People with the highest scores were labeled Chronic Offenders and subjected to constant surveillance, preemptive police visits, and intimidation.

A 2019 audit found the program failed by its own metrics. Almost half of the people in the Chronic Offenders database had zero or one violent crime arrest. The program's most consistent result was targeting Black and Latino men. Black and Latino residents made up 84 percent of those flagged in a city where Black people represent less than 10 percent of the population. In just six months in 2016, LAPD killed six men and boys in or near LASER surveillance zones. All were Black or Latino, four were teenagers, and four were shot in the back.

The New Orleans Police Department ran Palantir's system in complete secrecy for six years, from 2012 to 2018. Palantir provided the software for free, and a political consultant brokered the deal with the mayor without informing the city council, defense attorneys, or the public. When a journalist exposed it in February 2018, the City Council president said she had no idea it existed. Defense attorneys discovered for the first time that Palantir-generated evidence had been used in their clients' criminal cases without their knowledge.

The New York Police Department paid Palantir $3.5 million per year through a similar private arrangement that bypassed city oversight. When the NYPD tried to cancel the contract in 2017, Palantir refused to hand over the analytical data it had generated, claiming intellectual property rights over insights derived from New Yorkers' own public records. A private company held the city's data hostage until the contract dispute was resolved.

This is the pattern everywhere Palantir operates. They enter through private donations or no-bid contracts, build surveillance systems without public oversight, and claim ownership of everything produced. By the time anyone finds out, the system is already embedded in daily police operations.

Peter Thiel: The Billionaire Who Moved to Miami Before Palantir Did

Peter Thiel has been a Miami resident since 2020, when he paid $18 million for two adjacent mansions on the Venetian Islands. His investment firm Founders Fund has had a Wynwood office since 2021. In December 2025, his other firm Thiel Capital signed a lease for a second Wynwood office. Weeks later, Palantir announced its headquarters move to the city.

Thiel is Palantir's co-founder and board chairman. He controls the company through a special voting structure that guarantees he, CEO Alex Karp, and one other co-founder permanently hold 49.99 percent of all voting power, regardless of how many new shares the company issues. He owns approximately 70.9 million shares worth around $12.5 billion. His estimated net worth sits between $26 and $27 billion.

The ideology Thiel brings to this work is worth understanding on its own terms. In a 2009 essay published by the Cato Institute, he argued that democracy is an obstacle to the kind of freedom he believes in. He singled out welfare programs and women's suffrage as the reasons democracy had failed. He has publicly described surveillance AI as "a communist totalitarian technology." He runs a company that sells surveillance AI to governments as its primary business.

His political reach has grown substantially in recent years. He donated $15 million to JD Vance's 2022 Senate campaign, the largest individual donation to a Senate candidate in U.S. history, after years of funding and mentoring Vance's career. Vance is now Vice President of the United States. More than a dozen people with ties to Thiel currently work inside the Trump administration, including the White House AI Czar and the Deputy Secretary of Health and Human Services.

At least 11 White House staffers own Palantir stock. Stephen Miller, the architect of the administration's immigration enforcement policy, owns between $100,001 and $250,000 in Palantir shares held in an account registered to his child, while his office oversees the agencies that award Palantir its deportation contracts.

Palantir's Role in the Israeli Military Campaign in Gaza

Palantir's relationship with the Israeli military deepened sharply after October 7, 2023. The company took out a full-page New York Times advertisement declaring "Palantir stands with Israel," and CEO Alex Karp stated on the February 2024 earnings call that "after Oct. 7, within weeks, we are on the ground and we are involved in operationally crucial operations in Israel."

In January 2024, Karp and Thiel traveled to Tel Aviv to meet Israeli defense officials and formalized a strategic partnership with the Israeli Ministry of Defense. Palantir held its first board meeting of 2024 in Tel Aviv and has been expanding its Tel Aviv office since. In a formal response to the Business and Human Rights Resource Centre, Palantir acknowledged providing the Israeli military with "scaled, critical target identification and kinetic workflows," which is corporate language for helping identify and strike targets.

By October 2025, Palantir was powering the Gaza Civil-Military Coordination Center, a U.S. military compound in southern Israel. A U.S. Army photograph from November 2025 shows military personnel standing in front of a monitor running Palantir software at the facility.

In June 2025, UN Special Rapporteur Francesca Albanese named Palantir among 48 corporate actors in a report finding "reasonable grounds to believe" the company provided "automatic predictive policing technology" and an AI platform enabling "real-time battlefield data integration for automated decision making." Norway's Storebrand Asset Management divested $24 million in Palantir shares in October 2024. San Francisco State University divested the following month. Multiple members of Congress returned Palantir campaign donations after the report was published.

Karp has publicly acknowledged that his vocal support for the Israeli military campaign has caused employees to resign. He has not changed course.

How Denver Organized Against Palantir and Forced Them to Leave

Palantir moved to Denver in August 2020, also fleeing sustained protests in Silicon Valley. Within five years, Denver organized them out of the city too.

Starting in spring 2025, a coalition including Denver DSA, the Colorado Palestine Coalition, SEIU Local 105, and the American Friends Service Committee launched sustained campaigns against Palantir's downtown headquarters. They held weekly demonstrations outside the building, pressured the landlord about lease renewals, and tracked every political donation Palantir and its executives had made to Colorado politicians. Those politicians were then publicly pressured to return the money. Several members of Congress did, pledging to redirect the funds to immigrant rights organizations.

On July 14, 2025, a national day of action brought protesters into the streets in Denver, Palo Alto, Seattle, Washington D.C., and New York simultaneously. In Seattle, approximately 100 Jewish Voice for Peace activists occupied Palantir's lobby. In Denver, a former Palantir employee named Juan Sebastián Pinto led the march. Pinto is an Ecuadorian immigrant who worked at the company as a content strategist before leaving and declining to sign a non-disparagement agreement. He told NPR: "I simply cannot live in a world where my grandchildren have to be processed through a database where their everyday activities are tracked, collected and used for an authoritarian government's policing database."

On November 1, 2025, Palantir's planned Cherry Creek office was vandalized overnight, with graffiti reading "Palantir out" painted across the building and a glass door shattered. Protests continued through January 2026. Denver City Councilmember Serena Gonzales-Gutierrez condemned the company at a council meeting, calling it "complicit in helping ICE track and target people's movements."

Palantir departed on February 17, 2026, publishing their eight-word post on X. SEIU Local 105 President Stephanie Felix-Sowy responded: "Good riddance. Palantir can expect communities to continue voicing their opposition to them, whether they are in Denver or Miami."

What Palantir Employees Have Said from the Inside

Dissent inside Palantir is not new, and it has been escalating for years.

During Trump's first term, more than 200 Palantir employees signed an internal letter demanding the company end its ICE contracts. In August 2019, after the Mississippi raids, employees petitioned management to donate all ICE contract profits to nonprofits. Neither petition changed anything. Most employees who leave are required to sign non-disparagement agreements, and many hold company stock worth millions of dollars, creating substantial financial pressure to remain quiet.

In May 2025, thirteen former employees published an open letter through NPR under a collective name, declining to identify themselves by name because of NDAs and the value of their equity. They wrote: "Big Tech, including Palantir, is increasingly complicit, normalizing authoritarianism under the guise of a revolution led by oligarchs." They warned that "government databases are already erasing references to transgender people" and that "these injustices could be facilitated by the very software infrastructure we helped build."

In late January 2026, an ICE agent fatally shot a nurse during an enforcement operation in Minneapolis. Palantir employees flooded internal communication channels with objections. One wrote: "In my opinion ICE are the bad guys. I am not proud that the company I enjoy so much working for is part of this." Others demanded ethical veto mechanisms over government contracts. Wired reported that Palantir had been so secretive about its ICE operations internally that employees had been learning about their own company's contracts through news coverage.

When CEO Alex Karp finally addressed staff after the Minneapolis incident, he kept details vague and required employees who wanted a substantive briefing to sign individual NDAs first. His response deepened the internal conflict.

Karp's public position has been consistent throughout. At Davos in January 2023: "You may not agree with that, and bless you. Don't work here." On February 2, 2026, two weeks before moving to Miami: "If you are critical of ICE, you should be out there protesting for more Palantir."

Why This Is Now a Miami Problem

Palantir is projecting $7.2 billion in revenue for 2026. Its U.S. government revenue grew 55 percent in 2025 alone. It recently landed a $10 billion Army contract. It is the surveillance company with the deepest operational roots inside the current federal government, and it has now made Miami its headquarters.

This city was built by immigrants in a literal, demographic sense. Miami-Dade County is the most immigrant-dense major county in the United States. Cuban exiles built entire neighborhoods from nothing. Haitian families rebuilt Little Haiti after arriving with nothing. Venezuelan, Nicaraguan, and Colombian communities shaped the culture, food, music, and economy of this place over generations. Miami without its immigrant population is not Miami.

The company that built the AI-powered system ICE uses to map deportation targets by neighborhood, the company that assigns address confidence scores sourced from Medicaid data, the company that helped coordinate the arrest of 680 people in a single day in Mississippi, is now headquartered here. Its chairman owns mansions four miles from Little Havana.

Denver's communities organized, showed up consistently, stayed loud across months, and made Palantir calculate that staying was not worth the scrutiny. Landlords reconsidered leases. Politicians returned donations under sustained public pressure. A former employee marched in the streets and put his name on it. The company ultimately decided to leave. Miami has more at stake than Denver ever did, and the same pressure that moved Palantir twice before is already building here.

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SOURCES

At PPTM, we don't publish claims we can't back up. Every fact, figure, and quote in this piece is sourced from verifiable reporting by journalists, researchers, and organizations who did the work of documenting it. We've listed every source below so you can read the original reporting yourself, draw your own conclusions, and hold us accountable if something doesn't check out. The truth is the only thing that should matter, and we're committed to it.

ICE Contracts & Deportation Tools

Police Surveillance

Israeli Military / Gaza

Peter Thiel

Stephen Miller / White House Conflicts

Denver Protests & Miami Move

Employee Dissent

Financials & Contracts

Miami Demographics

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