Sen. Mark Warner has been publicly promoting his efforts to crack down on Immigration and Customs Enforcement’s surveillance machinery. In a recent social media video, the Virginia Democrat celebrated “good news”—the launch of a Department of Homeland Security inspector general audit into ICE data privacy abuses—and said it was the result of his work to ensure the agency’s surveillance tools are subject to oversight. In a corresponding press release, Warner warned of the “serious risk” posed by ICE’s unchecked data collection practices and said the audit would help determine whether constitutional protections are being violated.
Campaign finance records show that just months before, political committees associated with Warner received $37,000 from Alexander Karp, the billionaire CEO of Palantir Technologies, one of the primary companies supplying ICE’s data surveillance and analysis tools. According to Federal Election Commission filings, on September 30, 2025, Karp contributed $27,000 combined to Warner’s joint fundraising committee and his leadership PAC, and on the same day, Karp gave an additional $10,000 to the Democratic Party of Virginia.
Palantir is deeply embedded in the ICE surveillance and enforcement infrastructure that Warner says is a threat to people’s constitutional rights. For years, the company has been building and maintaining platforms that allow ICE agents to integrate biometric data, immigration files, travel histories, criminal records, and other sensitive information into a unified system. Its software enables ICE to search across databases, map relationships, generate leads, and prioritize individuals for enforcement actions using large pools of federal data.
Among the systems Palantir developed in the past year for the Trump administration is a platform often referred to as ImmigrationOS, designed to consolidate multiple DHS and federal databases into a single interface and provide near-real-time visibility into immigration records. Palantir is also building a tool for ICE called ELITE (Enhanced Lead Identification & Targeting for Enforcement) that feeds on Medicaid recipient data and “populates a map with potential deportation targets, brings up a dossier on each person, and provides a ‘confidence score’ on the person’s current address,” according to a report by 404 Media.
Civil liberties advocates argue that these tools function as a digital dragnet, aggregating vast amounts of personal information with no transparency or oversight. Cindy Cohn, executive director of the Electronic Frontier Foundation, warned in an August 2025 op-ed that efforts to combine sensitive government data into “a single searchable system” amount to a revival of the early 2000s “Total Information Awareness” program. “The Trump administration’s ongoing efforts to combine access to the sensitive and personal information of Americans into a single searchable system with the help of shady companies should terrify us,” she wrote, noting that much of the effort “seems to rely on the data management firm Palantir.”
Palantir is not only mentioned by watchdogs. In the January 29 letter Warner sent to DHS Inspector General Joseph Cuffari—the same letter he later cited while celebrating the audit’s launch—Warner and Sen. Tim Kaine explicitly referenced ICE’s contract with Palantir. The senators said the agency had “entered a contract with Palantir to upgrade the Investigative Case Management system to include the Immigration Lifecycle Operating System” as part of what they described as a “muddled patchwork of technology procurements” that has significantly expanded DHS’ ability to collect, retain, and analyze information about Americans and enabled it to circumvent the constitutional protections provided by the Fourth Amendment.
Warner, who serves as vice chair of the Senate Intelligence Committee, did not respond to an inquiry about Karp’s September donations or whether he plans to keep the money.
Karp has previously described himself as a Democrat and even backed Democratic candidates as recently as 2024, but in the years since he has become an increasingly vocal supporter of the Trump administration’s immigration and national security agenda. On multiple occasions he has publicly aligned Palantir’s mission with conservative priorities, saying he is “supportive of the president’s … border and national security thing” and framing the company as “completely anti-woke.” Shortly after Trump’s election, in December 2024, Karp donated $1 million to Trump’s super PAC MAGA Inc.
While the vast majority of the at least $2.6 million in federal political donations that Karp has made since Trump’s election have gone to Republicans and Republican groups, Warner is not the only Democrat who has received his money. Sen. John Hickenlooper’s (D-Colo.) joint fundraising committee got $12,000 from Karp in March 2025, Rep. Jake Auchincloss (D-Mass.) got $7,000 in August 2025, Rep. Jason Crow (D-Colo.) got $7,000 in February 2025, and Sen. Chris Coons (D-Del.) got $400 in July 2025. Crow and Hickenlooper have both said they plan to donate $50,000 to immigrant rights groups to offset money they have raised from Palantir executives, according to a report by the Colorado Sun.
House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries’ joint fundraising committee received $44,300 from a senior Palantir employee for government affairs, Mehdi Allhassani, in February. Asked recently by an activist if he would commit to giving back his “about $25,000 in Palantir money,” Jeffries said he did not believe he took money from Palantir but would take a look into it, according to a video posted on X.
