UPDATE: Palantir has responded to our campaign by limiting issue submission to collaborators. If you are not a collaborator of one of the repos linked below, kindly post your issue to a different one ✊
Thank you so much for supporting our effort to protest Palantir's involvement with ICE!
The plan is to have people open issues on a number of Palantir's OSS projects on GitHub on Saturday, May 11th at 10am EST. Below is the list of repos we would like you to target and a template to post verbatim, with a personal statement at the bottom if you'd like.
We believe that Palantir's employees will take a principled stand and refuse to work on projects that support ICE when confronted with the facts about how ICE uses Palantir technology. We seeking to provide evidence to Palantir employees that their work is used to deport immigrant families and encourage them to apply pressure from within.
We can use all the help we can get, so please boost our signal on Twitter and other social media with the tag #NoTechForICE!
Palantir maintains several popular open source repositories, and their employees are required to review issues. You can help by opening an issue on one or more of these repositories.
ICE uses Palantir's software to deport families of migrant children
# Palantir has overstated the distinction between ERO and HSI
Palantir continues to insist that their work with ICE's Homeland Security Investigations (HSI) is separate and distinct from the deportations carried out by Enforcement and Removal Operations (ERO). But HSI regularly assists with deportations and collaborates closely with ERO, including sharing information stored in Palantir's systems.
[Read the latest article about it](https://theintercept.com/2019/05/02/peter-thiels-palantir-was-used-to-bust-hundreds-of-relatives-of-migrant-children-new-documents-show/) from The Intercept, and [another from 2017](https://theintercept.com/2017/03/02/palantir-provides-the-engine-for-donald-trumps-deportation-machine/).
[Documents recently released](https://www.documentcloud.org/documents/5980596-Smuggling-Initiative-ConOP.html) from the Department of Homeland Security provide proof of this. A quote from those documents:
> The 26 HSI special agents in charge (SAC) will coordinate with their respective 24 ICE Enforcement and Removal Operations (ERO) field office directors (FOD) to establish teams of HSI special agents and ERO deportation officers, with the support of the local HSI SAC intelligence program.
That operation occurred in 2017. ICE used Palantir technology to facilitate 443 arrests, with only 38 criminal prosecutions. Investigations began with children crossing the border unaccompanied, and ended with their families being arrested and/or deported. Assistance with cases ending in criminal prosecution is also troubling, because the guise of criminality can be easily stretched to justify mass deportation and the separation of immigrant families.
The collaboration isn't new. From a [DHS document from 2016](https://www.dhs.gov/sites/default/files/publications/privacy-pia-ice-icm-june2016.pdf):
> HSI and ERO personnel use the information in ICM to document and inform their criminal investigative activities and to support the criminal prosecutions arising from those investigations. **ERO also uses ICM data to inform its civil cases.**
Even if you don't work on projects supporting ICE, your company produces software that has directly enabled ICE to deport families. Ask yourself if the good your project does outweighs the harm caused by these deportations. Talk to your coworkers about whether they're okay with the collaboration between Palantir and ICE.
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Maybe worth clarifying that this is Saturday 10 am EST