WASHINGTON — Palantir Technologies, the company that built ICE the software it uses to decide who gets deported, has sponsored at least one table at Thursday night’s Congressional Hispanic Caucus Institute Awards Gala, where Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, D-N.Y., is scheduled to present Rep. Nydia Velázquez, D-N.Y., with a Lifetime Achievement Award, according to a source familiar with the sponsorship.
Ocasio-Cortez found out from a reporter.
“This is the first we’re hearing of [the Palantir donation],” said a spokesperson for Ocasio-Cortez, who said their team would “look into it.”
Migrant Insider put one question, in writing, to the three people who would know the answer — Rep. Darren Soto, D-Fla., who chairs CHCI’s board; Marco A. Davis, the institute’s president and chief executive; and Cristina Antelo, the lobbyist who registered to represent Palantir in March:
Will you share the details of the Palantir sponsorship of CHCI?
None of them replied.
The Payday
A table at the CHCI gala is not a ticket purchase. It is a sponsorship tier, with a $25,000 price tag, that buys a company recognition in the program and a seat inside the largest gathering of Latino political and corporate power in the country.
There is no published policy on who may buy one. No stated exclusion for federal contractors. No disclosure requirement matching sponsors to tiers. An institute insider says Palantir’s money would have been refused in past years.
“I don’t know why Darren is doing this,” said the insider, who declined to be named on the record for fear of retribution from Soto and the organization. “I know they have told Cristina ‘no’ in the past when she wanted to give them money for her shady clients, so I don’t know why this year is different.”
The Institute
CHCI was founded in 1978 by members of the Congressional Hispanic Caucus as a 501(c)(3). In 1981, federal regulators barred organizations like it from fundraising on government property, an acknowledgment that the arrangement was already uncomfortable. The wall that went up then was thin. Everything since has been built against it.
The chair is a sitting member of Congress. Soto also serves as vice chair of policy for the Congressional Hispanic Caucus, and sits on the House Energy and Commerce Subcommittee on Communications and Technology — whose published jurisdiction includes cybersecurity, communications privacy and data security, and all aspects of that jurisdiction related to the Department of Homeland Security. He sits on Commerce, Manufacturing and Trade, which covers consumer privacy and data security.
Ferox Strategies registered to lobby for Palantir in March under issue codes including Homeland Security, Defense, Science and Technology, and Health. The stated purpose: educate policymakers about security and data privacy.
Those are the same words. The man chairing the board that took Palantir’s table sits on the panel that writes law on the subject Palantir is paying to be heard on. Nothing in CHCI’s structure treats that as a problem.
Soto’s own immigration record makes it stranger, not simpler. He voted against the Laken Riley Act in January 2025, telling Florida Phoenix he had “a big problem with people merely being accused and deported.” He is not a Democrat who went soft on ICE. He is a Democrat who voted to protect immigrants from ICE and chairs a board with no mechanism to keep ICE’s contractor out of the room.
The Revolving Door
Antelo ran CHCI. She served as its interim chief executive and later sat on its board of directors. She is a founding member and past president of the Hispanic Lobbyists Association. Her Palantir registration lists her covered government position as legal fellow for the Senate Democratic Steering Committee.
Nothing prohibits a former CHCI chief executive from later selling a client access to CHCI. No cooling-off period. No recusal. The institution that trained her is now a market she serves.
Davis, who has run CHCI since May 2019, came from the other side of that market entirely — leadership development at UnidosUS, fellowships at Ashoka, the Obama administration’s White House Initiative on Educational Excellence for Hispanics, the venture philanthropy New Profit. He represents CHCI on the board of the Hispanic Association on Corporate Responsibility, a group whose purpose is holding corporations accountable to Latino communities.
He also runs a fundraising machine. CHCI reported $12.9 million in revenue in 2024 against $11.7 million in expenses, with roughly $30.1 million in assets. The gala pays for the internships. The internships are the mission. Corporate tables are how the internships get paid for, and the institute has never published a line about which corporations are too far.
The Cost
ICE is paying Palantir $30 million for ImmigrationOS, a platform built to track self-deportations, select targets for arrest and speed up what the contract calls the immigration lifecycle. Palantir took in $1.855 billion from the federal government last year and spent more than $6 million lobbying Washington, a company record.
Politico Influence reported in March that Palantir hired Antelo and fellow Ferox lobbyist Debra Dixon to repair relations with congressional Democrats the company considered abysmal.
“Democrats don’t like the [deportation] raids, they don’t like ICE, they don’t like Trump, and they’re trying to take it out on the tool that ICE is using,” Antelo told Politico. She told O’Dwyer’s there is “a massive perception-versus-reality gap with Palantir.”
Antelo will talk to Politico about Palantir. She will talk to O’Dwyer’s about Palantir. She would not tell Migrant Insider what Palantir paid the institute she used to run.
AOC, the Democrat handing out Thursday’s top award has spent her career arguing the opposite of Antelo’s pitch. In June 2025, Ocasio-Cortez joined Sens. Ron Wyden, Elizabeth Warren and Ed Markey in demanding answers from Palantir CEO Alex Karp about reports the company was building the IRS a searchable mega-database of Americans’ tax records.
In May, she signed a second letter, led by Reps. John Garamendi and Ted Lieu of California and signed by roughly 30 Democrats, demanding answers about ICE’s use of Palantir tools to surveil U.S. citizens.
Thirty Democrats put their names to that. One of them is presenting Thursday’s top award. None of them had a say in who paid for the room.
This is a story powerful people don’t want told about how money corrupts another former advocacy stronghold of pro-migrant Washington. For more reporting like this, subscribe to Migrant Insider:
It's easy to see why why Palintir is doing this. They are trying to muddy the waters for Democrats. It's a cheap trick. It's been done before. AOCs people will need to get ahead of who is buying in, in the future, when she participates. Sadly some of the people she trusted before, can no longer be trusted.
Palintir and other companies run by Oligarchs have metastisized their cancer everywhere in our culture. That why it's extra important to fight these guys by shutting down the country and refusing to buy things and spend money. I hope she takes the opportunity to use this as a teaching moment and point out that the sponsor of that table is also a sponsor of state sanctioned terrorism against brown people! Not only that, but Palintir benefits from government contracts to make money on misery, so point that out!