PORTLAND – Nurses at Maine’s largest hospital are demanding MaineHealth cut ties with Palantir, a company they said works too closely with the federal government to be trusted.

“There’s no reason that a company with that backwards of values should be involved with any health care organization,” said Matthew McDonald, a surgical ICU nurse at Maine Medical Center in Portland.

McDonald is a steward at the hospital for the Maine State Nurses' Association. A local chapter of National Nurses United, the union represents over 2,000 nurses at MMC alone, and even more statewide.

“We’re definitely in the thousands,” he said.  

Last week, union nurses went public calling for MMC to stop working with any tools developed by Palantir. The AI software developer has come under fire in recent years for developing tools to assist federal agencies, including U.S. Customs and Border Patrol and Immigration and Customs Enforcement.

In a statement, the nurses referred to a system Palantir developed for ICE that it calls Enhanced Leads Identification and Targeting for Enforcement, or ELITE. Immigration advocacy groups have lambasted the tool, with the American Civil Liberties Union and the Electronic Frontier Federation alleging the tool allows agents to find large groups of immigrants in one location, making indiscriminate arrests easier.

Palantir denies such claims, saying in a blog on its website, “The purpose of this tool is identifying the location of known foreign nationals who meet criteria for removal, not for mass prioritization of ‘locations where lots of people it might detain could be based.’” The blog is quoting an EFF article.

McDonald said the nurses asked the hospital’s board of directors what it was using Palantir products for, but got no answers. 

“We sent a letter to the board and got a response back that basically said, ‘We don’t really have to tell you anything,’” he said. “It just seems very secretive.”

In a July 22 statement, officials at MaineHealth, the hospital’s parent organization, said the hospital does not share patient data of any kind with Palantir. It uses a Palantir AI tool to help process insurance claims, particularly to help the hospital streamline challenges to insurance companies denying coverage. 

“The role of the tool is limited to this one function,” officials said. “Palantir’s technology is not involved with clinical decisions, nor does Palantir own or control MaineHealth data.”

McDonald said that ultimately it doesn’t matter what MMC uses Palantir AI technology for. 

“Our main message is that regardless of how they’re involved with Palantir, regardless of when they got involved with Palantir, there’s no reason they should be involved,” he said.

McDonald said he lives in Biddeford, “two minutes” away from the intersection of Pool and Hill Streets, where an ICE agent shot and killed Johan Guerrero, a Colombian national living near the intersection on July 13.

McDonald said the nurses had been pursuing their inquiries into the hospital’s use of Palantir AI tools some time before the shooting, but he said the incident just underscored the ramifications of Palantir furnishing AI tools to federal agencies.

“It’s no stretch of the imagination that that technology could have been used in the shooting in Biddeford a couple of weeks ago,” he said.