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One of the founders of startup accelerator Y Combinator offered unsparing criticism this weekend of the controversial data analytics company Palantir, leading a company executive to offer an extensive defense of Palantir’s work.

The back-and-forth came after federal filings showed that U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) — tasked with carrying out the Trump administration’s aggressive deportation strategy — is paying Palantir $30 million to create what it’s calling the Immigration Lifecycle Operating System, or ImmigrationOS, to help ICE decide who to target for deportation, as well as offering “near real-time visibility” into self-deportations.

Y Combinator founder Paul Graham shared headlines about Palantir’s contract on X, writing, “It’s a very exciting time in tech right now. If you’re a first-rate programmer, there are a huge number of other places you can go work rather than at the company building the infrastructure of the police state.”

In response, Palantir’s global head of commercial Ted Mabrey wrote that he’s “looking forward to the next set of hires that decided to apply to Palantir after reading your post.”

Mabrey did not discuss the specifics of Palantir’s current work with ICE, but he said the company started working with the Department of Homeland Security (under which ICE operates) “in the immediate response to the murder of Agent Jaime Zapata by the Zetas in an effort dubbed Operation