Alex Bores’ work at Palantir complicates his anti-ICE stance

Assembly Member and congressional candidate Alex Bores supports abolishing ICE. He has called for U.S. Secretary of Homeland Security Kristi Noem to be impeached. Noem herself suggested that comments Bores made about her bearing responsibility for the killing of Renee Good in Minneapolis incite people to “take action and perpetuate violence.”

In other words, Bores has been as vocally opposed to the Trump administration’s mass deportation efforts as most liberal Democrats in New York, if not among the most critical in recent weeks.

But as the race for New York’s 12th congressional district ramps up in Manhattan, scrutiny of Bores’ previous employment by a prominent ICE contractor could complicate his positioning as the candidate in the race most opposed to ICE.

Bores spent nearly five years at Palantir, the technology company that has all the hallmarks of a liberal Democrat’s worst nightmare: co-founded by billionaire Trump backer Peter Thiel, a symbol of Big Data – and worse, Big Government Data – and perhaps most notable today, a partner in Trump’s deportation efforts.

Bores joined the company as a data scientist in November 2014 and left in March 2019 as one of a few people leading the company’s federal government work. He said he never worked on the contract Palantir held with ICE, but worked on contracts with agencies including the Department of Justice and Veterans Affairs.

The Palantir contract, Bores said in interviews after he left the company and entered politics, was a major driver of his decision to leave the company. “I never did any of that work and I objected to it internally,” Bores said in 2022. “I quit when they made the decision to renew without putting in safeguards that I was recommending.”

Alyssa Cass, a spokesperson for Bores’ congressional campaign, said that he “chose principle over career advancement and lucrative compensation,” forgoing an offer of stock options and declining to sign an NDA. “When it became clear that Palantir would not limit their work to the drug trafficking and human trafficking cases they did with (the Homeland Security Investigations division of ICE) during the Obama administration, but instead allow (ICE’s Enforcement and Removal Operations division) to use Palantir for deportations, he made plans to leave,” Cass said in a statement.

ICE had been working with Palantir since before Bores joined the company, and concerns about the ICE contract had been raised publicly for two years before he left. Early in Trump’s first term, Palantir – whose other founder, Alex Karp, had been a noted Trump critic – said that it wouldn’t work with the Enforcement and Removal Operations arm of ICE that handled deportations, but with the Homeland Security Investigations division that was more focused on terrorism and trafficking.

But in 2017, the Intercept reported that the case management system developed by Palantir for ICE was accessed not just by the HSI division but by the deportations arm too. Calls from inside and outside the company to drop the contract with ICE began well before Bores left.

Bores didn’t elaborate on how he objected to the ICE work internally, beyond in conversations with colleagues. Cass said that through his work on a DOJ contract, however, he declined a request from the government to include immigration work in the scope of the contract. 

His departure from Palantir came just a few months before ICE renewed its contract with the company in August 2019 – a renewal that Bores thought was likely in advance, Cass said. Bores left in March 2019 after lining up a job at a now out of business AI company called Merlon.ai that provided anti-money laundering software to banks. (The company did not have government contracts, Cass said.) Bores launched his campaign for an open east side Assembly seat early in 2022 and was elected later that year.  

Bores has taken in donations from current and former Palantir employees through both of his Assembly campaigns and now his congressional campaign to replace the retiring Rep. Jerry Nadler. When celebrating his $1.2 million first-day fundraising haul in October, he responded matter-of-factly to an X user asking how many donations came from Palantir or people connected to it. 

“Employees at Palantir contributed $15,200 on my first day, or just more than 1% (of total money raised). That doesn't count ex-employees, which is harder for me to quickly search,” Bores wrote in response. “In any case, no, people connected to were not 99%. Almost the opposite. And all money raised was from people, no PACs.”

Bores has continued to face criticism for his Palantir work. Last week, the civil rights nonprofit Arc of Justice sent up a flare. “We cannot say ICE has no place in New York City while sending to Washington leaders whose professional careers were deeply embedded in the very machinery that sustains it,” President and CEO Kirsten John Foy said in the statement. “Our communities deserve honesty, courage, and leadership grounded in justice.” Foy did not respond to a question from City & State about whether he is working with any other candidate or PAC in the race.

“Alex agrees that ICE has no place in New York City, and that NYC deserves leaders who are steadfastly opposed to the agency’s presence here,” Cass wrote in a statement responding to Foy. “Alex supports abolishing ICE. He strongly opposes Trump’s mass deportation agenda, is already working to combat those policies, and will continue to do so in Congress.”

Palantir connections are being used as a political attack in a race in a neighboring district as well. New Engagement PAC has run social media ads attacking former City Comptroller Brad Lander for keeping the city invested in “ICE-linked Palantir.” Lander is challenging Rep. Dan Goldman, and the Democratic super PAC, which says it’s focused on the state of Georgia, did not respond to a request for comment on why it’s getting involved in the New York race.