Trump taps private corporation for database on every American
Cook County vehicle tracking program. Photo: Gerald Farinas.
Absolutely not. Hell no.
Handing over the data of every single American—our taxes, our Social Security info, our immigration status, maybe even our kids’ school data—to Palantir, the shadowy tech firm with a documented history of surveillance and authoritarian flirtation, is the death rattle of democracy.
Palantir, if you didn’t know, is the company co-founded by billionaire Peter Thiel—the same Peter Thiel who bankrolled Trump, gutted media freedom by suing Gawker into oblivion, and openly praised autocratic leadership. (New York Times, May 30, 2025).
This new Trump-era initiative, under “DOGE”—the Department of Government Efficiency (because fascism loves a tidy acronym)—wants to create a centralized master database that includes IRS records, Social Security files, visa and immigration data, and more.
Why stop there? School grades and assessments. Health data from insurance companies. Lists of relationships. It can be expanded.
And they want Palantir to build it.
That’s not efficiency.
That’s control.
That’s surveillance on a scale America has never attempted.
That’s China-style social credit with an American flag draped over it.
Don’t be fooled!
This is not about national security.
This is not about “streamlining services.”
This is about building an all-seeing eye, and giving it to a company that has a history of working with ICE to detain immigrants and deport families (Washington Post, July 2019).
Rep. Lori Trahan (D-MA) is right to raise alarm bells, saying the program “threatens Americans’ privacy and civil liberties” (NYT, 2025).
This isn’t some abstract concern.
It means your data, your life, could be filtered through an opaque algorithm, then passed to law enforcement or ICE without you ever knowing why.
No judge.
No jury.
Just the cold logic of tech-bro tyranny.
Even Republican Rep. Warren Davidson compared it to Tolkien’s One Ring—a weapon of pure corruption.
That’s how dangerous this is! Even Republicans who back Trump are terrified of what this database could become.
Because we’ve seen this before.
El Salvador’s CECOT megaprison system—where people are detained en masse without due process—was fueled by data tools like these, built on opaque “gang affiliation” scores with zero transparency or accountability (Human Rights Watch, 2023).
You think it can’t happen here?
It already is.
This kind of system is what dictators dream about!
Total information control.
Centralized access.
Corporate complicity.
Let me be blunt!
This is not how democracies function.
This is how police states begin.
No President—especially not one who tried to overturn an election—should ever be allowed to oversee a program like this.
No private company—especially not one with government contracts worth hundreds of millions and a blatantly partisan founder—should be trusted with this level of control over our lives.
We need every single American to understand this!
If this system goes live, the government will have a file on you before you even know it exists.
We must demand Congress shut this down.
We must demand tech companies refuse to build the tools of tyranny.
And we must never, ever again confuse “efficiency” with injustice wrapped in a sleek user interface.
We stop it now—or we lose the right to ever stop it again.
