You would prefer the human race to endure, right? For most people the answer to this question is a simple ‘yes.’ Not to Palantir founder Peter Thiel.
Much has been written about Palantir’s role in the fascist regime — from its humanity-skeptic founder to its decade-long technological arming of the U.S. deportation machine.
Most people have not yet been introduced to its younger sibling, Anduril.
Anduril Industries was founded in 2017 by Trump loyalist Palmer Luckey. Luckey donated $100,000 to Trump’s inauguration and has given millions to congressional Republicans. Not-so-fun fact, his brother-in-law is disgraced Congressman and child rapist Matt Gaetz. His fealty to Trump has not gone unnoticed. Anduril was rewarded through the One Big Beautiful Bill with a monopoly on border surveillance towers, to the tune of $6 billion.
Anduril’s towers, which surveil approximately 30% of the U.S. southern border, can identify a person from two miles away and a vehicle from even further. Anduril proudly claims that their use has resulted in the detentions of “hundreds of thousands” of migrants.
Even more concerningly, many of these towers are not placed in vast empty borderland but directly in communities, allowing the federal government to track people’s day-to-day lives. The U.S. Government Accountability Office found that the surveillance tower program failed all six of their six privacy protection tests. Experts in government surveillance have consistently noted that surveillance towers enrich contractors and deliver little true security, instead increasing the burden on taxpayers and accelerating human rights violations.
It’s important to note that while the construction of these towers began in 2019, during President Trump’s first term, Anduril’s own CEO recently bragged, “We did well under Trump, and we did better under Biden. I think we will do even better now.”
Anduril doesn’t just develop technology for Immigration and Customs Enforcement; as one of their co-founders clearly states, “We will tell candidates when they walk in the door, ‘You are signing up to build weapons.’” Anduril builds drones in partnership with EDGE Group, a UAE-controlled weapons conglomerate, empowering the UAE-enabled genocide in Sudan, which has killed tens if not hundreds of thousands of people and displaced over 12 million since 2023.
This Thursday, Feb. 19, Cornell Career Services has invited Anduril to our campus. Not only that, but Cornell’s Handshake has been consistently promoting near-weekly recruitment events with Customs and Border Patrol, including advertising openings for Deportation Officers, for the past two semesters.
This past week, students have been emailing and calling Career Services demanding they cancel Anduril’s upcoming Tech Talk. Students have passed Assembly resolutions and marched across campus with a clear message to our university administrators: Stop all recruitment for ICE and its collaborators.
Cornell’s unabashed promotion of ICE and its weapons manufacturer allies comes three years into genocides in Sudan and Palestine, and as rogue federal agents terrorize communities across our country. ICE has killed eight people in 2026 alone, not only familiar names of citizen protestors like Renee Good and Alex Pretti, but fathers inhumanely detained like 55-year-old Geraldo Lunas Campos and 46-year-old Parady La.
When will this university apply its mission “to do the greatest good” to immigrant communities in our country, and on our own campus? That day can’t come soon enough.
Adriana Vink '27 is an Opinion Columnist and a student in Cornell's School of Industrial and Labor Relations. Her fortnightly column One Day Longer takes aim at campus politics, international relations and labor exploitation. She can be reached at avink@cornellsun.com.
