It is not hyperbole to say: “We are living in evil times.”
This current moment resembles the early stages of the apocalypse envisioned by the Terminator film franchise. It feels like we are in a moment where life is imitating art — a dystopian figment of some sci-fi villain’s imagination becoming present reality. Instead of Skynet, we have Palantir ― a Peter Thiel-founded technology firm that builds technology that processes and analyzes massive amounts of information across systems.
The Terminator franchise focuses on the events leading to a future post-apocalyptic war between a synthetic intelligence known as Skynet and a surviving human resistance led by John Connor. Skynet deploys an arsenal of cyborgs known as Terminators, designed to mimic humans and infiltrate the resistance.
The films, especially Terminator 2 and Terminator 3, depict a system in which corporate technologists, military planners and government officials progressively transfer decision-making to increasingly autonomous technology.
What the Terminator films don’t include are wealthy technocrats, elected megalomaniacs and political sycophants deconstructing government institutions to fit their greed and visions of grandeur. More importantly, films like the Terminator franchise rarely view figures like Pete Thiel, a racist, anti-democratic conservative libertarian, as villains.
Another element the Terminator films fail to describe is the resistance. Who they are beyond their humanity facing species-cleansing by Skynet. However, here in this version of reality, the resistance is the labor movement.
The Resistance
Unionists have been a foundational force behind the Harbor Area Peace Patrol and similar grassroots defense organizations, helping shape their tactics, leadership and daily operations.
Active union members make up a significant portion of HAPP’s volunteer base. Organizers include educators and union officers from United Teachers Los Angeles, healthcare workers and attorneys who dedicate their time outside their professional roles to these resistance efforts.
Unionists leverage their organizational discipline to conduct daily morning patrols. Moving systematically in pairs, they drive through local neighborhoods, checking gathering places such as schools, libraries and markets for ICE presence. They report federal vehicle movements in real time through social media.
Unionists also place themselves in high-risk environments to observe and document federal overreach. That active resistance has made some of them targets for federal retaliation.
For example, Amanda Trebach, a union nurse with National Nurses United, was targeted and detained by federal agents while lawfully patrolling near Terminal Island.
Drawing from the historical memory of labor and civil rights movements, unionists have established safety and operational protocols. They organize nonviolent direct-action tactics, including visible community deterrents such as the “Adopt-a-Corner” program at Home Depot locations. They also deploy note-takers and photographers to document misconduct, reducing the state’s ability to characterize encounters as self-defense.
Unionists have integrated their union infrastructures into broader community alliances. Through their involvement, groups such as HAPP operate alongside the Community Self-Defense Coalition, a network of 65 organizations and thousands of individuals mobilized to defend marginalized neighborhoods.
The Fight Against Palantir
Palantir is known for surveillance and military applications of its products such as Palantir Gotham, its defense and intelligence software. Among other things, the software supports alerts, geospatial analysis and prediction. Foreign customers include the Ukrainian military. Palantir Gotham has also been used as a predictive policing system, recognized for its racist AI analytics.
Last month, nurses took to the streets to call for hospitals and the government to cut ties with Palantir over its role in the federal crackdown on immigrants and its increasing role in artificial intelligence and data systems in healthcare.
National Nurses United argues that Palantir’s federal contracts, particularly with Immigration and Customs Enforcement, enable authorities to identify, track and arrest immigrants for deportation.
NNU specifically points to ELITE, a Palantir system that the union says is being used by federal immigration authorities and incorporates Medicaid data to identify people for enforcement.
For nurses, the issue has a direct connection to their professional ethics. They routinely care for immigrant patients and families, including people who may avoid hospitals because they fear immigration enforcement. NNU argues that using healthcare data for immigration enforcement undermines patients’ trust in the healthcare system.
Palantir has also been working with HCA Healthcare, the nation’s largest hospital system. NNU objects to HCA’s use of Palantir technology for hospital operations, including nurse scheduling. The union argues that algorithms should not determine staffing without meaningful input from nurses and that automated scheduling can produce inadequate staffing and the wrong mix of nurses.
The bottom line: The same company helping government agencies surveil and deport people is increasingly being given access to sensitive healthcare systems and to decisions affecting patient care.
NNU is particularly concerned about the intersection of medical data, surveillance and immigration enforcement. That concern became more pressing following reports that Medicaid information was made available to ICE and subsequently shared with Palantir.
From the union’s perspective, patients should be able to tell a nurse about their medical condition without worrying that information collected through the healthcare system could ultimately contribute to an immigration investigation.
NNU is also using the Palantir campaign to make a broader argument: Artificial intelligence should not replace nurses’ professional judgment or be used primarily to reduce staffing costs.
The union connects Palantir to what it sees as a larger transformation of healthcare, in which corporations use technology to reduce labor costs while nurses are already dealing with understaffing and burnout.
That is why the Aug. 27 protests carried the broader slogan “Palantir Out” rather than simply “Palantir Out of ICE.” Hundreds of NNU members and allies demonstrated in Los Angeles and seven other cities, making it the union’s largest coordinated Palantir action to date.
NNU argues that Palantir, the Skynet of our time, represents two forms of workplace power at once: government surveillance of workers and communities, particularly immigrant communities, and corporate surveillance and automation inside the workplace, potentially replacing nurses’ discretion with algorithms.
A Labor Response
The California Federation of Labor Unions has approached the immigration crackdown primarily as a statewide workplace and labor-rights issue.
Its emphasis has been on defending California labor standards that protect workers regardless of immigration status and preventing federal enforcement from making those protections meaningless. The federation has addressed workplace raids, advised workers to know their rights and provided training related to government audits.
The LA County Federation of Labor has taken a somewhat different approach, concentrating on street mobilization, coalition-building and local rapid-response capacity.
The United Farm Workers is different from either federation because immigration enforcement is not simply a policy issue affecting part of its constituency. Its members and the agricultural workforce it organizes are directly in the crosshairs.
The UFW responded to January 2025 Border Patrol operations in Kern County by documenting the impact on farmworker families. UFW President Teresa Romero met with families of union members who had been detained and deported, including workers who had spent years in U.S. agriculture and left behind spouses and U.S.-citizen children.
The UFW also joined the Coalition for Humane Immigrant Rights, the Los Angeles Worker Center Network and others in litigation challenging allegedly unconstitutional stops and arrests connected to Los Angeles-area immigration raids.
Service Employees International Union United Service Workers West (SEIU-USWW) has operated closest to a rapid-response movement organization. Its president, David Huerta, was detained and injured while observing an ICE raid in Los Angeles on June 6, 2025. The union immediately demanded his release and an end to what it described as destructive and indiscriminate raids against immigrant communities. The charges were dropped this past July.
Huerta’s detention turned SEIU-USWW into a central actor in the confrontation between organized labor and federal immigration enforcement. The union has combined protests, community observation, coalition organizing, public messaging and political demands.
The International Longshore and Warehouse Union has also adopted an explicit policy condemning federal attacks on migrants.
The ILWU has called on the labor movement to stand with migrant workers and connected immigration enforcement to a broader assault on civil liberties, the right to protest, due process and democratic institutions.
After Huerta’s arrest, the ILWU condemned both his detention and the ICE raids, treating federal immigration enforcement as part of a larger question of state repression and working-class power.
The American Federation of Labor and Congress of Industrial Organizations (AFL-CIO), California Federation of Labor and LA County Federation of Labor provide infrastructure connecting unions. They can adopt policy, lobby governments, coordinate coalitions, provide training, conduct research and mobilize multiple unions.
Individual unions — the UFW, SEIU-USWW, NNU and ILWU — possess a different kind of power: They can act through members concentrated in particular industries and communities.
The UFW’s model is defense from inside the affected community. Its strength is proximity to workers being targeted.
SEIU-USWW’s model is direct confrontation. Its members and leaders have physically and publicly challenged immigration raids and repression.
NNU’s adds another dimension: public health. Nurses argue that immigration enforcement threatens not only immigrant workers but also patients’ willingness to seek care and nurses’ ability to provide it.
The ILWU’s model is solidarity, rooted in a long history of connecting attacks on particular groups of workers to attacks on the broader working class.
These aren’t separate struggles. They are different fronts in the same fight.
There won’t be a John Connor traveling back from the future to save us.
And for those of us who believe Jesus will return, he likely won’t do so until we move first to fix this mess.
The resistance, in other words, is already here. The question is whether we recognize it.