CWA District 1 Calls on New Jersey to Divest Public Worker Pensions from Palantir

CWA District 1 Calls on New Jersey to Divest Public Worker Pensions from Palantir

TRENTON, NJ - The retirement security of New Jersey’s public workers should never depend on the surveillance and detention of our neighbors.

Yet as of December 2025, the State of New Jersey Common Pension Fund D held more than $138 million in Palantir Technologies, the data firm that has become the technical backbone of ICE’s mass deportation operation. That money was earned by the dedicated public servants who show up every day to keep New Jersey running. It is their deferred wages, not the state’s speculative capital. Therefore, CWA District 1 is calling on the New Jersey State Investment Council and the Division of Investment to divest from Palantir entirely.

CWA District 1 sees two problems with New Jersey’s investment in Palantir. It exposes our members to serious financial risk, and it puts their pension dollars behind a company whose business model is diametrically opposed to everything they stand for.     

Palantir built and maintains ImmigrationOS, the platform ICE uses to identify, track, and target people for removal, drawing on Medicaid records, tax data, and commercial data brokers to map neighborhoods and score people’s home addresses in near real time. Many of the workers whose pensions prop up this company are immigrants themselves, or spend their careers serving immigrant communities. Ask any of them whether their retirement savings should bankroll the deportation and detention machine pulling families apart in New Jersey. The answer isn’t complicated.

The state has already accepted the underlying logic. In June, the State Investment Council of NJ divested its stake in GEO Group, the operator of Delaney Hall, and the Treasury described the move as a response to financial concerns that changed the company’s investment-risk profile (Source: Patch). 

That same reasoning lands squarely on Palantir. The company trades at valuation multiples far beyond anything its revenue supports, its share price lurches on single headlines, and its business is concentrated in exactly the kind of government contracts most exposed to legal challenge, regulatory disruption, and reputational damage. A public accountability report from Make the Road New Jersey and the LittleSis Public Accountability Initiative has already documented how the state’s Palantir holding conflicts with New Jersey’s own ESG policy, which treats human rights and civil liberties exposure as financially material risk. This is a fragile, overconcentrated bet placed with our members’ money.

Public pensions are not venture capital. They are a promise the state makes to the people who run its schools, hospitals, agencies, and services. Prudence, not speculation, is the standard those dollars are held to.

New Jersey proved it can act when the risk becomes clear. It did with GEO Group. There is no principled reason to treat Palantir differently, and every financial reason to treat it the same.

CWA District 1 calls on the State Investment Council to divest the pension fund’s holdings in Palantir Technologies, and we stand with the workers, families, and organizations across the state demanding the same.

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CWA District 1 represents more than 170,000 active and retired members across New York, New Jersey, and New England in public service, telecommunications, media, healthcare, manufacturing, and other sectors, including roughly 70,000 members in New Jersey.