Nurses Demand Collins Return Donations from Palantir, ICE’s Top Tech Contractor

Nurses and constituents held a press conference at the district office of Senator Susan Collins in Portland on Thursday to demand she stop taking future donations from Palantir Technologies, the tech company powering ICE surveillance. According to Purge Palantir’s “Palantir Payroll” tracker, Senator Collins has received more than $105,000 in political donations from Palantir executives, making her one of the top three recipients in Congress.

Community members urged Sen. Collins to join the growing list of Congressional members who are publicly rejecting Palantir’s campaign contributions – including U.S. representatives Raja Krishnamoorthi, Ro Khanna, Jason Crow, Pat Ryan and U.S. Senator John Hickenlooper – over the company’s close cooperation with ICE and federal immigration enforcement.

They called on the Maine Senator to donate the $105,000 in donations she has received from Palantir to immigrant rights and community organizations and commit to protecting Mainers from surveillance systems that fuel deportation, detention, and human rights abuses.

The federal government has cut more than a trillion dollars in funding for Medicaid and Affordable Care Act subsidies – threatening health coverage for tens of thousands of Mainers and risking hospital closures and service cuts across the state – while awarding billions of dollars in contracts to Palantir. Founded by Peter Thiel and led by Alex Karp, both billionaires, Palantir’s data mining and surveillance tools centralizes and organizes massive amounts of data collected by the federal government, including Medicaid data, to enable ICE to target, stalk, detain, and deport immigrants.

From 2009 to 2025, Palantir received $2.5 billion in federal government funding, but this number has grown tremendously in just the past year. Last July, the Department of Defense announced a $10 billion agreement with Palantir to use its technology to share data across federal agencies, enabling unprecedented surveillance power. This followed a $30 million contract awarded to Palantir by the Department of Homeland Security to build an AI-powered system that would identify immigrants for deportation. In Feb. 2026, the Department of Homeland Security and Palantir signed a $1 billion contract.

Palantir’s technology also extends to the health care industry. In Portland, MaineHealth has entered into a contract with Palantir, but has refused to provide further information on the contract.