A mid-sized crowd gathered at the corner of Bishop and Queen streets during Monday's lunch rush, waving signs reading “Palantir Automates Cruelty” and “Palantir Powers the Surveillance State” outside Pacific Guardian Center in downtown Honolulu. The peaceful demonstration targeted Palantir Technologies, the data analytics and artificial intelligence firm that protest organizers say has operated as an unlisted tenant inside the office complex for nearly a year without ever appearing in the building's tenant directory.
The protest was organized by the ACLU of Hawaiʻi and Indivisible Hawaiʻi, according to Aloha State Daily, with the actual on-the-ground organizing led by Zane Dalgamouni, a Punahou School student. Catherine Titzer, a community field fellow for the ACLU of Hawaiʻi, told the outlet that Palantir has been in Honolulu for about a year and that the protest sought to address what she called a large lack of transparency about the company's presence and activities in the city. Sergio Alcubilla, the ACLU of Hawaiʻi's community engagement director, set up a table with signs and organizational information for passersby.
Palantir had reportedly looked to renovate office space at Pacific Guardian Center as far back as September 2025, per reporting at the time from Pacific Business News, but protest members said the company's name never showed up in the building's tenant listings. Palantir, which provides analytics and AI tools for government defense, police enforcement, and higher education clients, also operates offices in Washington, D.C., New York, Washington state, and California, along with a presence in Canada, Europe, the Middle East, Asia, and Australia. The company changed its primary corporate headquarters from Denver to Aventura, Florida earlier this year, and is now described as a Miami-headquartered software company.
No Heads-Up for City Hall
Honolulu City Councilmember Tyler Dos Santos-Tam confirmed that local municipal leaders received no prior briefings or official notice about Palantir opening a physical office in the city, a gap that left local activists to discover the office space through online job postings rather than any public announcement. Those postings reportedly show Palantir recruiting for high-level military-facing roles in Honolulu, according to Aloha State Daily's reporting.
The company's federal defense footprint in the Pacific is substantial. Palantir holds a U.S. Air Force contract, awarded in 2024, to deliver Joint Fires Network integration services for U.S. Indo-Pacific Command, which is headquartered at Camp H.M. Smith on Oahu and oversees military operations across the Asia-Pacific region. The U.S. Army also awarded Palantir a 10-year, $10 billion contract in 2025 to consolidate its data tools, and the company has delivered initial prototypes of its $178 million Tactical Intelligence Targeting Access Node system, an AI-driven mobile ground station built to fuse satellite and sensor data for military targeting, to the Army for testing through this fiscal year.
Sanctuary Law Concerns
Civil liberties advocates argue the stakes go beyond military contracting. Even though Hawaii's Act 141 bars local law enforcement from assisting federal immigration enforcement, advocates note that federal agencies can sidestep those sanctuary protections by purchasing aggregated tracking data directly from private vendors like Palantir. Theresia Ota, who has volunteered with the ACLU of Hawaiʻi for about a month, said opposition to the ICE-related surveillance concerns was central to why she showed up, and she described the reelection of President Donald Trump as a sad state of affairs. Ota, who also named domestic violence as a personal issue that matters to her, said law enforcement personnel on the mainland have misused Flock camera access to stalk former partners.
That concern over Flock Safety's automated license-plate readers connects Monday's rally to a wider, ongoing reckoning. Stanford University ended its contract with Flock this month, shifting to a single-institution vendor after student and faculty pushback over inter-agency data sharing. Titzer, who graduated from Stanford and once served as co-president of the campus's ACLU chapter, said that chapter had organized around the university's Flock contract before she came to Honolulu. The Los Angeles Police Department, meanwhile, ended its predictive data-mining contract with Palantir following civil liberties audits and let its own Flock Safety agreement lapse in July, according to KQED.
Part of a National Pattern
Monday's demonstration is one node in a broader campaign that organizers call Purge Palantir, which has staged similar protests at Palantir sites nationwide, including at Stanford. Hoodline previously reported federal lawmakers redirecting more than $100,000 in Palantir-linked campaign contributions into nonprofit immigrant legal assistance funds after pressure from the movement. Indivisible Hawaiʻi, a progressive grassroots activist organization that is part of the national Indivisible movement, co-organized Monday's action alongside the ACLU of Hawaiʻi.
The demonstration drew people of all ages, and drivers passing by responded with honks and shakas, according to Aloha State Daily's account. Titzer described the protest as peaceful and generally well received. She advised members of the public to educate themselves first and then pass that knowledge on to friends and family, while Ota said the goal was to have a lasting effect on the community. The ACLU of Hawaiʻi and Indivisible Hawaiʻi said they plan to announce upcoming events through social media.
A Downtown Already in Flux
The protest also lands amid major physical changes already underway at Pacific Guardian Center, a full-block complex between Bishop and Alakea streets that includes two 30-story office towers and the historic 1929 Dillingham Transportation Building. In April, the Honolulu Authority for Rapid Transportation board approved eminent domain notices to acquire land and sidewalk easements at the complex for guideways and a station on the Downtown Skyline rail line, part of a downtown rail expansion already reshaping traffic and access along Bishop Street.
