Your Righteous Anger Has Sponsors: Who Is Really Funding the Anti-Palantir Protests

The case against Palantir is airtight. The anger driving people into the streets this week is completely justified. What nobody is talking about is who wrote the checks to put them there.

March 2, 2026 — Rolando

Your Righteous Anger Has Sponsors: Who Is Really Funding the Anti-Palantir Protests

TLDR: Protests are coming to Miami this week targeting Palantir, the $313 billion surveillance company that builds the AI tools ICE uses to deport people. The cause is real. Palantir's technology is genuinely dangerous to immigrant communities, and the concerns driving people into the streets are legitimate. But the organizations coordinating these protests are funded by a network of billionaires, anonymous dark-money conduits, and at least one person under active federal investigation for alleged ties to the Chinese Communist Party. These funders are not funding activism because they love your community. They are funding it because it serves their own political, financial, and in some cases geopolitical interests. This article explains who they are, what they are actually doing, and why every person who shows up to protest this week deserves to know the full picture before they let someone else's agenda attach itself to their righteous anger.

The Legitimate Concern

If you have not read the first PPTM piece on Palantir, the short version is this.

Palantir Technologies is a $313 billion data surveillance company co-founded by billionaire Peter Thiel, who owns mansions four miles from Little Havana and once wrote that freedom and democracy are incompatible. The company's business is selling powerful AI 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.

Their primary ICE tool is called Investigative Case Management, or ICM. An ICE agent types a name and immediately receives that person's home address, family members, vehicles, email accounts, photographs, phone location history, Medicaid records, license plate scans, IRS tax filings, and a map of everywhere they have been. More than 10,000 agents use this system simultaneously. In April 2025, ICE paid Palantir $30 million to build a new system called ImmigrationOS, specifically designed to identify deportation targets, track people in near-real time, and streamline the removal process from identification to arrest. A few months later, ICE added another $29.9 million contract for a tool called ELITE, which generates neighborhood-level deportation maps and assigns each person an address confidence score. Those addresses are partly sourced from Medicaid records.

The health insurance people signed up for to take care of their families is feeding the database ICE uses to find them.

Miami-Dade County has 2.7 million residents. Fifty-four percent were born outside the United States, the highest percentage of any major county in America. Palantir just moved its headquarters here. The anger people feel about that is completely justified.

That anger is also extremely useful to certain people. And those people have a lot of money.

The Organizations Organizing the Protests

The groups listed as organizers or co-organizers of the coming Miami protests include Mijente, the American Friends Service Committee through its Purge Palantir campaign, the Party for Socialism and Liberation Miami chapter, Climate Defenders, 50501 South Florida, Oil and Gas Action Network, the South Florida Anti-War Action Committee, the All-African People's Revolutionary Party Florida chapter, and Occupy Florida.

Some of these groups are genuinely grassroots with no institutional funding whatsoever. The South Florida Anti-War Action Committee is an informal network of volunteers organized through Instagram. The All-African People's Revolutionary Party is a Pan-African socialist organization founded in 1968 with chapters in 33 countries, funded by member dues, and with no documented institutional backing. 50501 South Florida is a chapter of a movement that started on Reddit in January 2025, funded by small ActBlue donations with no major donors attached. Occupy Florida is an anonymous volunteer network with no budget and no formal structure.

Those groups are exactly what they present themselves to be: people showing up because they believe in something.

The organizations at the center of the coalition, the ones with professional staff, national campaigns, and decades of infrastructure, are a different situation. Mijente and the American Friends Service Committee together account for roughly $45 million in combined annual revenue, and both receive significant funding from sources whose interests deserve serious scrutiny. The Party for Socialism and Liberation has organizational overlaps with groups connected to a network currently under investigation by three separate congressional committees and the FBI.

What follows is an explanation of where that money comes from and what the funders get out of it.

What Is a Donor-Advised Fund and Why Does It Matter

Before getting into the specific funders, it helps to understand the financial structure these organizations operate through, because it is specifically designed to be confusing.

A donor-advised fund works like this. A wealthy person wants to give money to a cause but does not want their name attached to it. They make a donation to an intermediary organization, take a tax deduction, and then tell that intermediary where to send the money. The intermediary issues the grants from its own name. The original donor disappears from the public record.

This practice is legal. It is used extensively by donors on both the left and the right. The Tides Foundation pioneered it for progressive causes in the 1970s. DonorsTrust performs a similar function for conservative donors. The practice itself is not inherently corrupt. But it creates a situation where organizations can publicly claim to represent a grassroots movement while actually being funded by billionaires who have no accountability to the communities affected by their decisions.

The question worth asking about any organization organizing your community around a cause is not just whether you agree with the cause. It is also: who is paying for this operation, and what do they want?

Mijente: The Most Visible Anti-Palantir Group and Who Funds It

Mijente is the organization most directly associated with the #NoTechForICE campaign, which specifically targets Palantir. Founded in 2015, it operates as both a 501(c)(3) nonprofit and a 501(c)(4) advocacy organization. Together those two entities reported $4.87 million in combined revenue in 2024 and held $11.87 million in net assets. This is a professional organization with a professional budget.

Its documented funders include some of the largest money-in-politics operations in the United States.

The Tides Foundation gave Mijente $600,000 in 2022 and $125,000 in 2020. The Ford Foundation gave $300,000 in 2022. The Foundation for a Just Society gave $325,000 in 2022. The Amalgamated Charitable Foundation gave $330,000 in 2021 and $190,000 in 2019. The Sixteen Thirty Fund, an organization managed by a for-profit consulting firm called Arabella Advisors, gave $170,000 in 2020. The New Venture Fund, another Arabella-managed organization, gave $24,000 in 2019. Open Society Foundations, the philanthropic vehicle of billionaire George Soros, is reported to have given $500,000 in 2019, though this specific grant has not been independently verified through IRS filings.

These are not neighborhood organizations pooling together small donations. These are nine-figure philanthropic institutions and dark-money conduits with their own political agendas. Understanding those agendas requires understanding who these funders actually are.

The Tides Foundation: The Original Dark-Money Machine

The Tides Foundation was founded in San Francisco in 1976 by a political activist named Drummond Pike. Its explicit purpose from the beginning was to allow wealthy donors to fund progressive causes anonymously. Pike said it himself: "Anonymity is very important to most of the people we work with."

The way it works in practice is that a donor makes a tax-deductible contribution to Tides and designates which organization should receive a grant. Tides then issues that grant from its own name, collects a 9 percent fee, and the original donor never appears in any public record. Critics have called this financial laundering. Tides calls it philanthropic infrastructure. The distinction matters less than the outcome: billions of dollars move through American civil society without the public ever knowing who actually sent them.

The scale is significant. The Tides Network reported $627.3 million in total revenue in 2023 and distributed $690.3 million in grants through approximately 400 donor-advised funds. Since its founding, it has moved over $3 billion through this structure.

The funding connections are documented in IRS filings. Open Society Foundations contributed $25.8 million to Tides in 2020 and 2021 combined, and an additional $17.8 million in 2022 and 2023. The National Legal and Policy Center, which tracks nonprofit financing, called Tides Center "George Soros' Favorite Money Handler." InfluenceWatch, which documents nonprofit finances from IRS records, identified Tides as having received at least $17.2 million from Open Society Foundations between 2009 and 2022.

Tides' grants to organizations in the anti-Palantir coalition are documented. It gave $600,000 to Mijente in 2022 and $125,000 in 2020. It gave $221,000 to the American Friends Service Committee in 2023. It gave $286,000 to Alliance for Global Justice in 2023. It gave $104,000 to CodePink in 2022.

The House Ways and Means Committee launched a formal investigation of Tides in May 2024, specifically targeting its role as a conduit that makes it "virtually impossible to trace the ultimate source of the funds." Committee Chairman Jason Smith wrote in July 2024 that Tides entities had been linked to funding organizations responsible for campus unrest and harassment. The committee stated it was "actively working with the IRS" on reviewing Tides' tax-exempt status.

The point is not that every organization Tides funds is doing something wrong. The point is that when a billionaire funds a cause through Tides, the community being organized around that cause has no way of knowing who actually sent the money, or why.

The Arabella Advisors Network: A For-Profit Company Running a Nonprofit Empire

Arabella Advisors is a for-profit consulting firm founded in Washington D.C. in 2005 by Eric Kessler, who previously worked in the Clinton administration. What makes Arabella unusual is that it manages a collection of nonprofit organizations as essentially in-house subsidiaries. Those organizations, including the New Venture Fund, the Sixteen Thirty Fund, the Hopewell Fund, the Windward Fund, and others, collectively raised approximately $9.2 billion between 2006 and 2023. In 2020 alone, the network pulled in roughly $1.7 billion.

The Sixteen Thirty Fund is the most politically active component of the network. Politico described it as "the indisputable heavyweight of Democratic dark money." Because it is classified as a 501(c)(4), it can spend up to 49 percent of its budget on political activities and is not required to disclose its donors. In 2020, the Sixteen Thirty Fund spent $410 million on political causes, which was more than the Democratic National Committee spent that same year.

The network's trademark tactic is creating what are called "pop-up" organizations: groups that look like independent local movements but are legally just trade names registered by Arabella's nonprofits. Researchers at Capital Research Center identified at least 340 of these pop-up groups, including organizations with names like "Arizonans United for Health Care" and "Floridians for a Fair Shake" that appeared to be grassroots local campaigns but were actually projects managed from Washington. This is directly relevant to any community that believes it is engaging with independent advocacy organizations.

The most significant controversy involves Hansjörg Wyss, a Swiss billionaire. According to the New York Times, Wyss has donated at least $265 million to Arabella-managed organizations, with some estimates of total U.S. nonprofit contributions reaching $700 million. Federal law bars foreign nationals from donating to political candidates or PACs, but the law contains a loophole that allows foreign nationals to contribute to nonprofits. Nebraska sued Wyss's network in November 2025 alleging illegal foreign spending on state ballot campaigns. Ohio passed a law expressly prohibiting foreign nationals from spending on ballot measures after documenting Wyss contributions; the Sixteen Thirty Fund abruptly stopped spending in Ohio following the law's passage.

In August 2025, WIRED reported that the Sixteen Thirty Fund had created a program called Chorus that paid over 90 social media creators between $250 and $8,000 per month to produce progressive content. The contracts required creators to keep the payments secret and gave Chorus the right to remove their posts at its sole discretion. House Oversight Committee Chairman James Comer launched a formal investigation in November 2025, writing that the program appeared to have circumvented campaign finance disclosure laws enforced by the FEC and the Department of Justice.

The New Venture Fund, another Arabella entity, gave $24,000 to Mijente in 2019. The Sixteen Thirty Fund gave $170,000 to Mijente in 2020.

The Party for Socialism and Liberation and the Singham Network

The Party for Socialism and Liberation is a Marxist-Leninist political party with a chapter in Miami that is listed as a co-organizer of the coming protests. The PSL itself is a small organization that took in $43,674 in total donations during the 2020 presidential election cycle.

The more significant issue is the network the PSL operates within.

Neville Roy Singham is a 71-year-old American businessman who founded ThoughtWorks, an IT consulting company, and sold it for $785 million in 2017. He then moved to Shanghai, married CodePink co-founder Jodie Evans, and began funding a network of left-wing organizations that congressional investigators and the New York Times have connected to Chinese government propaganda operations.

The New York Times published an investigation on August 5, 2023, titled "A Global Web of Chinese Propaganda Leads to a US Tech Mogul." The investigation found that Singham uses "a tangle of nonprofit groups and shell companies" to fund organizations that work "closely with the Chinese government media machine." One outlet in his network co-produces programming financed partly by Shanghai's propaganda department. Another works with a Chinese university to spread what it describes as China's voice internationally. The Times found that Chinese state media accounts had retweeted people and organizations in Singham's network 122 times since February 2020. The Times documented that Singham attended a Communist Party workshop about promoting the party internationally and shared office space in Shanghai with a media company whose stated mission is educating foreigners about China.

The funding flows through a layered structure. Money moves from Singham through private LLCs into donor-advised funds, then into nonprofits including the United Community Fund, the Justice and Education Fund, and People's Support Foundation, all of which had addresses at UPS store mailboxes in Illinois, Wisconsin, and New York. The United Community Fund reported nearly $40 million in revenue in 2019 before dropping to $6,133 by 2022, a pattern consistent with a pass-through structure.

The organizations receiving money from this network include The People's Forum in New York, which received over $20 million between 2017 and 2022 according to House Ways and Means Committee documentation. They also include CodePink, which the Ways and Means Committee found received approximately 25 percent of its total donations from Singham-connected sources. The ADL has documented that the Party for Socialism and Liberation, The People's Forum, and the ANSWER Coalition share "considerable organizational and leadership overlap." A PSL organizer was quoted as describing The People's Forum and similar groups as "led primarily by comrades."

Three congressional committees are actively investigating. The House Oversight Committee voted in January 2026 to subpoena Singham. Representative Anna Paulina Luna stated: "He is a known foreign agent for China." The House Ways and Means Committee held a February 2026 hearing on the network. Senate Judiciary Committee Chairman Chuck Grassley requested the DOJ investigate The People's Forum and CodePink for potential violations of the Foreign Agents Registration Act, writing that their activities "directly advance the communist Chinese government's political and policy interests." Senator Marco Rubio had already referred Singham to the DOJ for FARA violations in July 2024. FBI Director Kash Patel confirmed agents are "investigating any and all monetary connections responsible for these riots" following anti-ICE unrest in Los Angeles and Minneapolis in 2025 and early 2026.

Singham denies all of this. His statement: "I categorically deny and repudiate any suggestion that I am a member of, work for, take orders from, or follow instructions of any political party or government."

The allegations against Singham have not been proven in a court of law, and the investigations are ongoing. They are documented, however, in official congressional records, a front-page New York Times investigation, and active FBI inquiries. His Shanghai residency means he cannot be compelled to testify before Congress. Applying the same scrutiny to this funder that one would apply to any powerful institution is not a political position. It is basic due diligence.

The question of why a Chinese-adjacent network would benefit from weakening Palantir specifically is worth examining. Palantir CEO Alex Karp has stated publicly that the company is preparing "for a conflict with a great power like China in the Pacific." Palantir's platforms support battlefield targeting in Ukraine against Russian forces, and China and Russia have a documented strategic partnership. Palantir holds a $10 billion U.S. Army contract and has staffed itself with prominent China hawks including former NSC China Director Matthew Turpin and former House China Committee Chairman Mike Gallagher. The ImmigrationOS system that activists are protesting also tracks the unprecedented surge of Chinese nationals crossing the southern border illegally, which went from approximately 6,100 in fiscal year 2019 to over 22,000 in just five months of fiscal year 2024. Congressional testimony has warned this flow provides cover for intelligence operatives. The strategic overlap between weakening Palantir and serving Chinese geopolitical interests is real, documented, and worth knowing about before marching under a banner funded by people in that network.

George Soros and Open Society Foundations

George Soros is an 89-year-old Hungarian-American billionaire who made his fortune through currency speculation and has spent decades funding political advocacy through the Open Society Foundations. OSF's cumulative giving exceeds $24.2 billion. Soros has pledged his entire fortune to the foundation, which has operations in more than 120 countries.

His positions on immigration are not hidden. Open Society Foundations advocates explicitly for open borders, the abolition of ICE, and the elimination of most immigration enforcement. In 2019, OSF gave $500,000 directly to Mijente. OSF gave $25.8 million to the Tides Foundation in 2020 and 2021 combined, and an additional $17.8 million in 2022 and 2023. Tides then funneled a portion of those funds to organizations including Mijente and AFSC. OSF gave over $3.4 million to the National Immigration Law Center and more than $11 million to the Vera Institute of Justice, both of which advocate against immigration enforcement.

In a symbolic move that speaks for itself, Soros Fund Management sold its entire $500 million Palantir stake in March 2021, with a spokesperson stating the fund "does not agree with Palantir's business practices."

What does Soros gain from funding anti-Palantir activism? He has stated his ideology plainly for decades. He believes national borders are obstacles to the open society he is trying to build. Weakening the surveillance infrastructure that enforces those borders advances that project. The communities being mobilized around this cause may genuinely share his concerns about what Palantir's technology does to families. Whether they share his broader project of dismantling border enforcement as a category is a question worth asking.

The Ford Foundation: $16.8 Billion in Assets, $20 Million Per Month in Grants

The Ford Foundation is one of the largest private foundations in the world, holding $16.8 billion in assets. It was created in 1936 by Henry and Edsel Ford and has spent decades evolving away from the values of its founders.

Under former president Darren Walker, who led the organization from 2013 to 2025, Ford reorganized entirely around the concept of challenging inequality. It launched the BUILD program, committing $1 billion to strengthening what it calls social-justice infrastructure. Its technology-focused programming directly targets surveillance, data collection, and what it calls digital rights. Capital Research Center documented Ford spending approximately $20 million per month, roughly $700,000 per day, on advocacy grants.

Ford's documented grants to anti-Palantir coalition funders include $200,000 to the American Friends Service Committee in 2023, $900,000 to the Electronic Frontier Foundation, $15 million for something called the Global Network for Social Justice and Digital Resilience, $12 million through a Spyware Accountability Initiative, $4.5 million for a "Reclaiming the Border Narrative" initiative, and $10.1 million to the Four Freedoms Fund for what it described as immigrant justice. Ford also gave $300,000 directly to Mijente in 2022.

The original Ford Foundation came under congressional scrutiny in 1969 when the Patman Committee investigation found its activities so far outside traditional charitable work that the Senate's proposed Tax Reform Act would have outlawed, in the committee's own estimate, 70 percent of what the foundation was doing. Henry Ford II resigned from the board in 1977, writing a letter explicitly criticizing what the foundation had become.

What Ford gains from funding anti-surveillance activism is straightforward. Ford has spent decades and billions of dollars building a global network of civil society organizations. Surveillance infrastructure threatens that network. Tools that allow governments to monitor, map, and target individuals and organizations are tools that can be turned against the organizations Ford funds. The Electronic Frontier Foundation, which Ford funds extensively, exists to challenge exactly this kind of technology. The interest is institutional self-preservation dressed in the language of universal rights.

The Schmidt Family Foundation: A Conflict Worth Naming

The Schmidt Family Foundation is the philanthropic vehicle of Eric Schmidt, former CEO of Google, currently one of the most aggressive investors in defense-AI technology. The foundation holds approximately $1.9 billion in assets and distributed $137.6 million in grants in 2023, focused primarily on climate, ocean conservation, and sustainable agriculture.

No direct funding link was found between the Schmidt Family Foundation and Mijente, AFSC, PSL, or any organization in the Miami protest coalition. The Oil and Gas Action Network, however, received $425,000 from the Schmidt Family Foundation between 2019 and 2022.

The reason Schmidt belongs in this story is a structural conflict of interest worth understanding. Schmidt's personal portfolio includes White Stork Group, which builds AI-powered attack drones that have been deployed in Ukraine. He invested in Rebellion Defense, which sells military AI software directly competing in the same government market as Palantir. He founded the Special Competitive Studies Project, a national security think tank modeled on Cold War defense planning. He chaired both the Defense Innovation Board and the National Security Commission on Artificial Intelligence simultaneously between 2016 and 2021 while holding direct personal investments in AI startups those bodies were shaping policy around. CNBC reported in October 2022 that Schmidt helped write AI laws in Washington without publicly disclosing his AI company investments. Senator Elizabeth Warren formally requested a Pentagon investigation into his conflicts of interest in December 2022.

Palantir holds a $10 billion Army enterprise contract and a $1.3 billion Project Maven contract. Schmidt's companies operate in the same government market. Any reputational damage to Palantir has potential financial value to Schmidt's competing ventures. Whether the Schmidt Family Foundation's $425,000 grant to Oil and Gas Action Network, a co-organizer of the Miami protests, reflects that interest is not established by the available evidence. The structural overlap between Schmidt's defense portfolio and Palantir's contracts is documented, and naming it is fair.

Why This Matters: The Money Is Not Neutral

Palantir is worth scrutinizing. Its technology enables real harm to real people in Miami. Its chairman lives here. Its tools are feeding family separations. Those are facts that do not change based on who is funding the opposition.

But movements do not exist in a vacuum. They require infrastructure, coordination, professional staff, media relations, website maintenance, legal support, and travel budgets. That infrastructure costs money. Someone pays for it. And the people who pay for things get to shape what those things are for.

When the Tides Foundation gives $600,000 to Mijente, Tides is not giving that money because it cares about the families affected by deportation. Tides is a pass-through mechanism for donors who want anonymity. The interests of those anonymous donors are by definition invisible to the communities being organized.

When the Sixteen Thirty Fund, managed by a for-profit consulting firm that takes fees from billionaires, gives money to immigration advocacy groups, those advocacy groups become part of an ecosystem designed to elect Democrats and move policy in directions that serve that ecosystem's donors. The families in Hialeah and Homestead are props in that machinery unless they understand that it exists.

When a network connected to a person currently under FBI investigation and congressional subpoena, a person with documented ties to Chinese government propaganda operations who sold his company for $785 million and moved to Shanghai, funds organizations that share leadership with groups showing up at these protests, the people marching deserve to know about it. Not because that makes their cause wrong. Because the cause is too important to be hijacked by someone else's geopolitical agenda.

The history of progressive movements in America is full of genuine people doing genuine work who had no idea their organizations were being used as vehicles for powerful interests that did not share their values. The labor movement was infiltrated. The civil rights movement was monitored, manipulated, and destabilized from multiple directions simultaneously. The anti-war movement of the 1960s became a theater for competing political projects that had little to do with the people being sent to die in Vietnam.

None of this means the causes were wrong. It means powerful interests exploit righteous anger when they can, and the people with the most to lose are always the ones at the front of the line who did not know what they were walking into.

What To Do With This Information

This is not an argument to stay home. It is not an argument that Palantir is actually fine. It is an argument for going in with eyes open.

Ask the organizations coordinating this week's protests where their money comes from. Request that answer in writing. If they refuse or deflect, that is information. If they are genuinely grassroots organizations funded by member dues and small donations, they should be able to say so clearly.

Research the specific demands being made at the protests. Some demands may align with what the billionaires funding the coalition also want: weakening enforcement infrastructure broadly, not specifically protecting Miami's immigrant community. Other demands may be genuinely community-centered and worth fighting for.

Notice whose interests are served by each outcome. A weakened Palantir does not automatically mean safer communities. It means a market opportunity for the next surveillance company, potentially one with less visibility and less accountability. The problem being protested is not just one company. It is an entire system of government surveillance outsourced to private corporations with minimal public oversight. The organizations funded by billionaires will not fix that system because many of those billionaires depend on it.

Support organizations that are actually accountable to the communities they claim to serve. The difference between an organization with a $4.87 million annual budget funded by the Tides Foundation and a volunteer network of people showing up from their own conviction is a difference worth caring about.

The anger is yours. The cause is yours. Do not let someone else monetize it.

Sources

At PPTM, every fact and figure in this piece is traceable to primary documents, congressional records, investigative journalism from credible institutions, and IRS filings. Every source is listed below so you can read the original material yourself, draw your own conclusions, and hold this reporting accountable.

Palantir / ICE Contracts

Mijente Funding

Tides Foundation

Arabella Advisors / Sixteen Thirty Fund

Neville Roy Singham / PSL

Open Society Foundations / George Soros

Ford Foundation

Eric Schmidt / Schmidt Family Foundation

Palantir and China / Defense Context

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