SCOOP: Palantir Began Paying CHCI's Board Before It Paid CHCI
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SCOOP: Palantir Began Paying CHCI's Board Before It Paid CHCI
The House's No. 3 Democrat took Palantir money on the first day of last year's Hispanic Heritage Month. Now he's one of the board members deciding whether to fire the Palantir-friendly CEO.
WASHINGTON — A year before Palantir tried to put its name on CHCI’s gala, the company had already reached the organization’s board.
On Sept. 15, 2025, the first day of Hispanic Heritage Month, House Democratic Caucus Chairman Pete Aguilar, D-Calif., received a $1,000 contribution from [Palantir’s political action committee / a Palantir employee — confirm per FEC], Migrant Insider has learned. The donation has not been previously reported.
Aguilar sits on the board of the Congressional Hispanic Caucus Institute. CHCI is the Latino advocacy organization now reeling from a Palantir sponsorship deal brokered by Palantir lobbyist Cristina Antelo and CHCI President and CEO Marco Davis. If CHCI’s board votes on whether to remove Davis, Aguilar gets a vote.
I met Davis last night at a gala afterparty. He told me, “you can’t be here.”
For everyone at home keeping score, that’s
Palantir: Welcome.
Migrant Insider: Nope.
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The machine behind the raids
Palantir is not a peripheral vendor to Trump’s mass deportation campaign. It builds the core of it.
The Department of Homeland Security first contracted Palantir to build its case management system in 2014. That system is ICE’s digital spine. In April 2025, ICE entered a $30 million contract with Palantir to upgrade it into what the agency calls ImmigrationOS. Palantir got the deal without competitive bidding: ICE argued in a justification letter that the contract had to be awarded quickly, with no opportunity for competing bids.
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ICE’s own documents describe what the system does. It ranks people for deportation using visa status, criminal records and data aggregated from dozens of federal and commercial databases. It gives the agency “near real-time visibility” into self-deportations. And it handles the detention-to-removal pipeline, from apprehension scheduling to flight booking. The sole-source deal it was folded into has ballooned to over $145 million.
The ACLU put it plainly this spring: Palantir’s tools form the backbone for ICE’s mass deportation regime. The conflicts reach into the White House itself. Stephen Miller, the administration’s chief architect of immigration policy, holds a substantial financial stake in Palantir, according to the American Immigration Council.
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CHCI exists to build the next generation of Latino leaders. Its interns and fellows come from the same communities, and in many cases the same mixed-status households, that Palantir’s software is designed to sort, flag and remove.
CHCI’s own board did not see Palantir’s money during Hispanic Heritage Month as a sponsorship. They saw a surveillance contractor paying to attach its name to the celebration of the people it helps deport.
“FIRE PALANTIR”
Multiple attendees of CHCI’s 49th annual awards gala at the Walter E. Washington Convention Center told Migrant Insider that the Palantir deal was the talk of the dinner program. CHCI Chairman Darren Soto, D-Fla., ordered Davis to return the money after learning of the deal through our reporting.
The night’s marquee honor was a lifetime achievement award for Rep. Nydia Velázquez, D-N.Y., a 33-year House veteran and a pioneering Latina in the chamber.
Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, D-N.Y., was supposed to introduce her. On Tuesday, Ocasio-Cortez arrived at the Capitol for two votes wearing a mask. I watched her tell a House colleague, and then a reporter on the House steps, that she had COVID-19.
It was Rep. Delia Ramirez, D-Ill., a CHCI board member, who took the stage to present the award. She wore a large button on her dress that read “FIRE PALANTIR.”
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The math on CEO Marco Davis
After Political Influence reported on the backlash, some of the 43 Latino lawmakers on CHCI’s board are considering calling for a vote to remove Davis.
CHCI’s bylaws set a high bar. Two-thirds of voting board members must be present for a quorum. Of those present, two-thirds must vote yes to remove him. Davis served in the Obama administration as deputy director of the White House Initiative on Educational Excellence for Hispanics, an underwhelming and now-defunct effort that compiled data on the demographic but had no direct, demonstrable impact on student outcomes before it ran its course.
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Antelo, who sits on CHCI’s advisory board, faces her own reckoning. A growing number of board directors, including at least three lawmakers, argue she should go. Migrant Insider reported Tuesday that Antelo and Davis went behind Soto’s back to create a still-opaque “special sponsorship” package. That is according to a lawmaker on the board who stopped me Wednesday under the Capitol Rotunda while I was making the rounds with my camera.
“Not from me though,” the lawmaker said of the tip. “Marco’s nice but what the fuck was he thinking.”
The question for Monday
This morning, Migrant Insider sent each of the 43 lawmakers on CHCI’s board one question for a follow-up story Monday:
Would you vote to remove Marco Davis as President/CEO of CHCI? Why or why not?
The anger in the room last night was not abstract. One Hill aide texted during Velázquez’s acceptance speech:
“I can’t believe Nydia’s lifetime achievement award was almost sponsored by Palantir.”
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We’re trying something new today. Hill aides have been reaching out to me about this story all week, a story that might never have come out without Migrant Insider’s relentless, gumshoe reporting. If you’re a Hill aide, or you work somewhere else that lets you expense a subscription, here’s a form that might help:
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