Purge Palantir: Union Nurses Fight Big Tech Surveillance in Healthcare

On August 27, registered nurses, patients, and community allies took to the streets in coordinated acts of civil disobedience across eight U.S. cities, halting traffic to demand that hospitals and elected officials sever all ties with artificial intelligence giant Palantir. Spearheaded by National Nurses United (NNU), the nation’s largest union of registered nurses, the “Purge Palantir!” campaign thrusts a glaring spotlight on the quiet, invasive creep of big tech surveillance and corporate software into a healthcare system already buckling under intense financial strain.

The Frontline Reality Behind the Tech Infiltration

Far away from Silicon Valley boardrooms, nurses on hospital floors grapple daily with a crumbling infrastructure that prioritizes balance sheets over patient well-being. Kiera Arbour, a registered nurse in the neurosurgical ICU at Stroger Hospital of Cook County in Chicago, brings a unique perspective to the crisis. Arbour completed her nurse residency program and now navigates the devastating human toll of poverty-related illnesses in one of the country’s largest safety net hospitals.

“In the neurosurg ICU, anybody who’s a gunshot wound to the head comes to us, blunt force trauma to the head… and then a whole bunch of people who have had strokes because they live in food deserts, they don’t have access to healthy things to eat or they don’t know how to manage chronic conditions like diabetes and high blood pressure,” Arbour explains. She contrasts her patients’ harrowing realities with the privileged lives of her peers’ aging parents, underscoring a broken system that fails to allocate adequate resources to working-class communities.

This operational strain is mirrored nationwide. Kelli Brennan, co-president of the Maine State Nurses Association and a nurse at MaineMed in Portland, points out that the so-called nursing shortage is a myth. “There’s a shortage of nurses willing to work in unsafe conditions at the bedside,” Brennan notes, detailing chronic understaffing, high turnover, and management’s reliance on temporary or traveling staff instead of investing in nurse retention.

In Kansas City, Missouri, Lee Barker faces similar ratios on the inpatient psychiatric unit at Research Hospital. Barker’s unit routinely stretches safe staffing ratios past breaking points, pushing nurses to manage ten or twelve patients at a time despite grids calling for safer limits.

How Palantir Software Operates Inside Hospitals

While bedside nurses fight for basic safety, hospital executives are embedding Palantir’s data applications into the core architecture of patient care and hospital administration.

The surveillance concerns extend far beyond hospital walls. National Nurses United President Jamie Brown emphasized the moral crisis of allowing Palantir tools to enable federal immigration enforcement. Federal contracts awarded to Palantir by the Department of Homeland Security and the Department of Defense—totaling billions of dollars over recent years—have equipped immigration agents with AI-driven tracking capabilities, creating an atmosphere of terror that deters vulnerable immigrant communities from seeking essential medical treatment.

Financial Entanglements and Public Accountability

The entanglement with big tech is not limited to operational software.

“We became nurses because it sounds cheesy, but it is a calling,” Arbour notes, reflecting on the profound dissonance of funding a tech giant whose systems aid state surveillance while patients delay care out of fear of detention. The August 27 day of action saw nurses in Palo Alto, Los Angeles, Chicago, Washington D.C., Portland (Maine), Asheville, Austin, and New Orleans demand an immediate end to these compromises.

Taking Action From the Ground Up

The “Purge Palantir!” campaign serves as a stark reminder that communities do not have to accept the unchecked expansion of corporate surveillance.

As big tech continues its push into public institutions, union nurses are making it clear that healthcare must remain a sanctuary dedicated to human dignity, free from the prying algorithmic eye of Silicon Valley.