Palantir beats Wall Street expectations amid Trump immigration crackdown

Palantir celebrated its latest financial results on Monday, as the tech company blew past Wall Street expectations and continues to prop up the Trump administration’s push to deport immigrants.Palantir has secured millions of dollars in federal contracts amid Trump’s crackdown on immigrants. The multibillion-dollar Denver-based firm creates tech focused on surveillance and analytics, to be used by the government agencies and private companies.Palantir’s biggest US customer is the Department of Defense; it also works with the Department of Homeland Security, and the majority of its revenue comes from deals with the federal government. Palantir reported 66% year-over-year growth in revenue from government contracts, to $570m.Palantir has drawn further criticism over its role in the government’s immigration agenda, since federal immigration officers killed two protesters in Minneapolis last month.Palantir chief executive Alex Karp told CNBC in an interview Monday that Palantir helps protect sensitive data. “If you are critical of ICE, you should be out there protesting for more Palantir,” he said. “Our product, actually, in its core, requires people to conform with fourth amendment data protection.”The company beat Wall Street expectations of $1.33bn with $1.41bn in revenue for the fourth quarter of 2025. It reported earnings per share (EPS) of $0.25 – which also surpassed Wall Street expectations of $0.23 in EPS. The company’s stocks jumped about 8% in after-hours trading after the release.Karp described the company’s growth on an earnings call as “one of the truly iconic performances in the history of corporate performance”. He wrote in a letter accompanying the earnings report that the $1.4bn in revenue generated in last year’s fourth quarter marks a new record – a 70% growth rate over the same period the year before.“We did this while supporting, in critical manner, some of the most interesting intricate, unusual, operations that the US government has been involved in – many of which we can’t comment on – but were the highlight of last year and highly motivating to all of us at Palantir,” Karp said.Karp doubled down on his data protection claim on the call, arguing that Palantir’s work with the US government, including intelligence agencies, aligns with the fourth amendment and makes sure “every institution that uses (Palantir’s) products is doing it within conformity of the law and ethics of America”.Data privacy advocates are not convinced. “Palantir tools are ICE’s digital henchmen,” said Will Owen, communications director at the non-profit, Surveillance Technology Oversight Project, in a statement to the Guardian. “Their revenue may be up thanks to Trump, but no one is buying that they hold ICE accountable.”Last year, ICE awarded Palantir a nearly $30m contract to build ImmigrationOS, which makes it easier to pull information about immigrants from across government databases – regardless of the accuracy of those records. 404 Media recently reported on the existence of another tool created by Palantir for the federal government: Enhanced Leads Identification & Targeting for Enforcement (Elite).Elite “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 404 Media. The program reportedly relies on address data from the Department of Health and Human Services, which includes Medicaid.Wired reported last week that the federal government has been using Palantir’s AI tools to process immigration enforcement tips. Wired also reported that the health department has been using other Palantir AI tools to screen grants and job descriptions for diversity, equity and inclusion (DEI), and “gender ideology”.Palantir has said there is no malicious intent in its work with the federal government.“To be absolutely clear, Palantir is not working on any master database project to unify databases across federal agencies,” read a company blogpost last week. “Palantir has not proposed the US government build a ‘master list’ for the surveillance of citizens, nor have we been asked to consider building such a system for any customer.”Palantir has described 404 Media’s claims about the Elite tool as misleading; the company says it is “used for prioritized enforcement to surface the likely addresses of specific individuals, such as those with final orders of removal or with high severity criminal charges”.Trump’s “big, beautiful bill” awarded DHS and ICE huge budgets to pursue the administration’s anti-immigrant policies, including $45bn for ICE to expand its detention capabilities.In 2025, Palantir’s federal contracts almost doubled – and increased to more than $970m; this amount was distributed across the government, mostly to the defense department, but it also includes the DHS.