Why Palantir's ImmigrationOS Endangers Democracy and the Rule of Law

What if the most consequential immigration policy decisions in America aren’t being made by elected officials, or even by government agencies — but by software? Right now, a sprawling ecosystem of private technology vendors is quietly reshaping who gets flagged, detained, and deported in the United States. At the center of it is Palantir’s ImmigrationOS, a platform for end-to-end automated enforcement. But it’s just one piece of a much larger machine.

Today we’ll hear from the authors of a new law review article that argues that private tech vendors have become a third governing power in American immigration — sitting between the federal government and the states, encoding policy into code, and building infrastructure that increasingly poses a threat to democracy and the rule of law:

• Chinmayi Sharma, an associate professor at Fordham Law School who is also affiliated with the Strauss Center at University of Texas, the Atlantic Council Cyber Statecraft Initiative, the Center for Democracy and Technology, the Georgetown Center on Privacy and Technology, and the Center for AI and Digital Policy.
• Sam Adler, a third year law student at Fordham Law School.