Nurses Take Palantir Fight to Peter Thiel's West Hollywood Doorstep

Registered nurses and community members plan to gather outside 9200 Sunset Boulevard in West Hollywood next Thursday at noon, staging a protest aimed squarely at the office of Thiel Capital, the investment firm founded by Palantir chairman and co-founder Peter Thiel. The demonstration is one of eight planned nationwide by National Nurses United, targeting the data-analysis and artificial intelligence company's rapid expansion into hospital operations and its long-running work with U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement.

The West Hollywood action, scheduled to begin at noon on August 27, was first detailed by WEHOonline, which reports that other demonstrations are planned in Palo Alto, Chicago, Washington, D.C., Portland, Maine, Asheville, Austin and New Orleans. National Nurses United represents more than 225,000 registered nurses nationwide and has organized what it calls a Palantir Out protest, calling on hospitals, elected officials and the federal government to cut ties with the company. This is not the first time 9200 Sunset Boulevard has drawn direct action tied to Thiel and Palantir — 13 demonstrators were arrested there in June 2025 after occupying the building's lobby during a separate protest over the company's immigration surveillance contracts, according to LA Taco.

Health Data Feeding ICE Enforcement Tools

Central to the nurses' grievance is Palantir's Enhanced Leads Identification and Targeting for Enforcement tool, known as ELITE, which is used by ICE and includes information on people with final removal orders or serious criminal charges, per the same WEHOonline account. ICE can use ELITE information to help locate people it seeks to arrest, and Palantir has said the tool helps the agency determine likely addresses of specific individuals. According to the Electronic Frontier Foundation, ELITE draws from several government databases, with the Department of Health and Human Services providing addresses used in the system — a connection reporting from The BMJ found extends to Medicaid records feeding target dossiers and address confidence scores for ICE deportation operations.

Palantir disputed EFF's characterization of ELITE, saying it does not operate a government-wide master database and that, per the company, ELITE information comes from sources ICE is legally permitted to access. The Department of Health and Human Services has acknowledged that federal law authorizes the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services to share specific healthcare recipient data with the Department of Homeland Security for law enforcement purposes, according to The BMJ. Civil-liberties organizations argue that health-care and public-service information should not be repurposed for immigration enforcement, the WEHOonline report notes.

Nurses Say AI Tools Undercut Clinical Judgment

National Nurses United spokesperson Jamie Brown said, “No part of the country has been untouched by the terror and violence of ICE and CBP, enabled by Palantir's technology.” Brown also said nurses have seen hospitals buckle under conditions of extreme scarcity, tying the union's immigration concerns directly to its objections over staffing software. Palantir has expanded rapidly into health care, and the company describes its hospital products as tools for anticipating staffing needs, assigning beds and reducing administrative work — software that hospitals use for nurse scheduling, patient-bed assignments, discharge management and staffing projections.

Nurses argue that Palantir systems can justify inadequate staffing and replace clinical judgment with software and distant administrators, per WEHOonline's reporting. National Nurses United contends hospitals are introducing Palantir technology without adequate regulation, transparency or bedside-nurse input, and the union has specifically criticized Palantir's work with HCA Healthcare, the nation's largest for-profit hospital system, which uses the Timpani scheduling system through HCA Inspire. Timpani has shifted some staffing decisions from local hospital managers to a centralized Nashville operation, the union says — a claim National Nurses United previously amplified in April when it demonstrated outside the Frist Gala in Nashville, demanding HCA end its Palantir partnership, according to National Nurses United.

A Broader Campaign Against a Growing AI Contractor

The West Hollywood protest lands amid a wider push by nurses to pressure lawmakers over Palantir's political ties. In July, National Nurses United organized demonstrations outside the Chicago residence of Sen. Dick Durbin and the St. Louis office of Rep. Wesley Bell, urging both to return campaign contributions from Palantir. Not every health system agrees with the union's assessment: MaineHealth defended its Palantir contract in July, stating the platform is used to analyze patterns in insurance claim denials and help clinicians contest insurer rejections, according to Becker's Hospital Review.

Palantir has extensive government, defense and health care contracts, and has worked with ICE for years. Last September, ICE awarded the company a $30 million contract to build ImmigrationOS, a surveillance platform designed to centralize public and federal database records for law enforcement tracking, according to the Business & Human Rights Resource Centre. In California, where the demonstration will take place, state Assemblymember Mia Bonta introduced Assembly Bill 1979 this year, sponsored by the California Nurses Association, which would bar health facilities from basing clinical decisions solely on AI outputs and prohibit replacing licensed health workers' clinical judgment — legislation that follows the state's landmark 2004 mandate setting minimum nurse-to-patient staffing ratios in acute care units, according to the University of California, San Francisco's Healthforce Center.