Nurses Across US Demand Hospitals Cut Ties With Palantir, Citing ICE and Gaza

Por Shireen Akram-Boshar — Truthout

National Nurses United is expanding its campaign against Palantir in a global week of action starting on September 28.

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National Nurses United (NNU), the largest union of registered nurses in the U.S., is demanding that hospitals cut ties with Palantir, with nurses citing the firm’s role in developing technology used to surveil immigrants in the U.S. and target civilians in Gaza.

The union – which represents more than 225,000 nurses in all 50 U.S. states — has announced a global week of action against Palantir, set to begin on September 28.

Palantir’s “AI-powered tools for large-scale data collection and mass surveillance… threaten human rights globally,” the union said in a press release announcing the campaign.

The global week of action is aimed at pushing all public institutions — including hospitals and other health care providers — to end contracts and partnerships with Palantir, and to divest from the company, the union said.

The global week of action builds on a national day of action, also led by the union, which saw demonstrations in eight cities across the U.S. on August 27, including in Portland, Maine; Washington, D.C.; Chicago; Austin; and Los Angeles.

The global week of action is also coordinated with health care workers in the U.K., where National Health Service (NHS) workers and activists will protest Palantir’s use in health care on October 1. Other organizations, like Amnesty International and the Boycott, Divestment, Sanctions (BDS) Movement, are also part of the global week of action.

“Palantir has no place in patient care, no place in our communities, and no place in our society,” a NNU nurse said in a video from the August 27 day of action.

The nurses have outlined Palantir’s complicity in human rights violations both nationally and internationally, from detentions of immigrants by Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) to the genocide in Gaza.

“We think that a company that specializes in mass surveillance, kidnappings and killings, has no place in patient care,” one nurse explained in a video posted by the California Nurses Association.

During the August day of action, nurses placed 50 pairs of baby shoes in the street in each city – to represent the 500 babies and toddlers who have been detained in immigrant jails since President Donald Trump started his second term. The nurses also brought letters written by children in ICE detention.

“Palantir, we know, helps ICE identify people to kidnap off of our streets,” another nurse said during the day of action.

The company also has “their hands in the genocide and murders of civilians in Gaza,” another nurse present at the protests said. “They’ve [helped with the targeting of] hospitals, schools, mission workers taking food and aid….”

In a statement shared with Truthout and read at the August 27 day of action, Chicago-based nurse and NNU member Elizabeth Lalasz said that “nurses, health care workers, our patients, immigrants, and allies from every walk of life stand united here in Chicago and all across the country to demand an immediate end to the violence inflicted by Palantir technologies and the Trump administration.”

“As we speak, Palantir’s AI is enabling atrocities and human rights abuses: ICE killings, mass deportation, and concentration camps with no access to health care – even the imprisonment of more than 500 babies and 6,200 children – and Palantir is providing the technology for Israel’s U.S.-funded genocide in Gaza, the cruel and illegal war in Iran, and mass surveillance at home and abroad,” she went on.

Lalasz also noted that Palantir has partnered with the world’s largest health care corporations “to suck more and more profit from our broken health care system, causing untold suffering in our hospitals.”

“This country could fund health care for 12 million children with the money spent on ICE detention alone,” she said.

João Paulo Connolly, an activist in the Bay Area who has organized protests against Palantir, explained in a webinar that “Palantir’s profit model is data extraction and surveillance,” and then “giving employers new, powerful ways to monitor and spy on their workers at all times and track their behavior,” while also selling the health care industry and the federal government “unprecedented levels of access” to this data.

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Shireen Akram-Boshar is a socialist writer, editor and Middle East/North Africa solidarity activist.

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Fonte: Truthout