LAST Thursday thousands of registered nurses – joined by patients and community allies – mobilised to demand hospitals and elected officials immediately cut ties with artificial intelligence giant Palantir in cities across the United States.
The nurses, who are members of National Nurses United, the nation’s largest union of registered nurses, stopped traffic in an act of civil disobedience in eight cities: Palo Alto, California; Los Angeles, California; Chicago, Illinois; Washington, DC; Portland, Maine; Asheville, North Carolina; Austin, Texas; and New Orleans, Louisiana.
The actions included visual displays of the deadly costs of Palantir’s products, including its development and operation of ELITE, an application used by federal agents that identifies people for arrest using, in part, improperly obtained Medicaid data.
In each city, nurses placed 50 pairs of baby shoes in the street – one pair of shoes representing every 10 babies who have been detained since President Trump took office.
Passersby could also see large images of the heart-wrenching notes written by some of the 6,000 children who have been imprisoned by federal agents since the second Trump term began.
The nurses also held large red umbrellas emblazoned with eyes, symbolising that nurses are keeping an eye on Palantir’s harmful activities.
NNU President Jamie Brown, a Registered Nurse, said: ‘Union nurses cannot be silent when our most vulnerable people, babies and children, are being detained by federal immigration agents.
‘While our patients and neighbours are living in fear of immigration raids enabled by Palantir, our hospitals are facing huge cuts and our patients are facing mounting health care costs because of H.R. 1.
‘Nurses aren’t just saying no to Palantir, but we’re calling for our public resources to go toward the benefit of working people, not billionaires and their corporations.’
While the US government and corporations award the company billions of dollars in contracts, the US health care system faces a dire threat.
H.R. 1 is the 2025 budget bill, pushed through by Republicans and President Trump, that cut more than $1 trillion in Medicaid and Medicare funding to give billionaires tax breaks, militarise immigration enforcement, and fund endless wars abroad.
Not only will these cuts threaten health coverage for millions of people, they risk closures and service cuts at more than 600 hospitals nationwide, according to new NNU research.
Brown continued: ‘What we know is the money spent on Immigration Control and Enforcement (ICE) detention could fund health care for at least 12 million children every single year. Nurses and our allies condemn these unjust, misguided political choices.
‘Everyone deserves health care, education, and housing. Our politics should not be controlled by billionaires.’
Across the eight cities, NNU nurses were joined by community allies in their calls to ‘Purge Palantir!’
Kenny Morris, campaigns strategist for the American Friends Service Committee, said: ‘Palantir makes money by enabling mass violence in the US and around the world.
‘The surveillance company has no place in our hospitals, our utilities, our investments, or our government.
‘This day of action shows just how many communities are organising to push our institutions to cut ties with Palantir.’
Dani Noble, campaigns organiser for Jewish Voice for Peace, said: ‘Palantir should have no place in our hospitals — it’s designed to control and to harm.
‘It is a company built on unlawful surveillance deeply embedded in policing and war, all to generate profit for right-wing billionaires.’
Fatima Mohammadi, director of organising at US Campaign for Palestinian Rights (USCPR) said: ‘Palantir’s AI technology is used to harm our communities by putting patient care in the hands of a machine, identifying and tracking immigrants for ICE abduction, and targeting Palestinians in Gaza for assassination.
‘The well-being and safety of our loved ones and neighbours are at stake.
‘Palantir out of hospitals! Every institution must cut ties with Palantir now.’
- Nurses at Kaiser Permanente facilities across the state of California will hold informational pickets today, September 1st, to protest at Kaiser management’s refusal to address nurses deep concerns about safe staffing and AI protections.
More than 25,000 nurses working for Kaiser are represented by California Nurses Association/National Nurses United (CNA/NNU).
Kaiser nurses are in the early stages of negotiations on a new union contract and want the public to understand their key issues.
The Registered Nurses (RNs) urge management to invest in nursing staff and agree to a contract that provides protections against untested and unregulated implementations of artificial intelligence technologies, all in order to prioritise patients over Kaiser’s billions of dollars in income, investments, and reserves.
‘High-quality patient care starts with safe staffing on every unit on every shift at every facility,’ said Michelle Gutierrez-Vo, RN in the Adult and Family Medicine Department at Kaiser Fremont Medical Center.
‘Across its network, Kaiser is constantly trying to cut staff. That’s unacceptable for us as nurses, and it endangers our patients and their care.’
‘We want Kaiser to understand that our position is simple,’ said Deb Capistrano, RN in the Telemetry Department at Kaiser San Francisco Medical Center.
‘New technology must be tested, regulated, and include us in the conversation about its implementation. Anything less threatens our practice as nurses and our patients’ health.’
Representing more than 25,000 nurses at 22 Kaiser facilities across the Golden State, CNA has more than 100,000 members statewide and is an affiliate of NNU, the country’s largest nurses union, which represents more than 225,000 nurses nationwide.
- More than 1,500 health care workers, in addition to tens of thousands of innocent civilians, have been murdered in Gaza since Israeli forces invaded in October 2023.
The Trump administration has been deploying an obscure legal manoeuvre to try to obtain private information on journalists, non-profits and unions, raising alarm over a power the government has asserted without judicial oversight.
In one instance, the government obtained six months of telephone records for Georgia Fort, a Minneapolis journalist.
Fort was not notified of the request for her information, nor was she given a chance to contest the government’s effort to obtain them, her lawyers said in court papers.
In February of this year, federal prosecutors twice sought search warrants for account information for the YouTube channel of Fort and the journalist Don Lemon, both of whom have pleaded not guilty to criminal charges in connection to a protest at a Minneapolis church in January that they were covering.
A judge twice rejected the request, writing that the government had failed to establish probable cause of a crime and that he wanted Lemon and Fort to be informed of the request so they could have a chance to challenge it.
About a month after the judge’s ruling in late February, the government said it was withdrawing the request.
The DHS also sought and obtained six months of phone records for Fort from T-Mobile, which included records for more than 10,000 calls and text messages. Fort was not notified the government was seeking the records until mid-July, when government lawyers produced them to her lawyers.
Fort’s lawyers wrote in a filing last week they were ‘stunned’ to see the government had unilaterally been able to obtain a log of her communications after a judge had warned them about obtaining records about a journalist.
In a separate case in which 15 activists face criminal conspiracy charges, DHS successfully obtained the financial records of the Sunrise Movement, the Service Employees International Union (SEIU) and the Communications Workers of America, as well as Venmo records for a non-profit organisation called Voices for Racial Justice.
None of the organisations is charged with crimes and the DHS did not offer an explanation for why it needed the records.
The unions have all said they will fight against measures being taken by the DHS and won’t be intimidated.
