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Cait Conley insists she “never worked for Palantir or ICE.” Yet The Intercept, Politico, and her own financial disclosure show that two AI surveillance firms have paid her $328,000, including Primer, which advertises its Palantir partnership on its own website and whose salespeople boast about pitching its platform to ICE and Customs and Border Protection. Why is Cait Conley lying about her work, and what is she so afraid voters will ask about?

Pearl River, NY — 6/16/2026… With the June 23rd Democratic primary days away, Cait Conley is pushing the message that the reporting on her AI work is a Republican lie, and using her campaign website “redbox” to ask super PACs and other big money groups to flood NY-17 with ads declaring that she has never worked for Palantir or ICE. She’s gone so far as to cut a new ad saying “MAGA Republicans” are “lying” about her. There’s just one problem. Cait Conley is spending the final week of her campaign lying about her connections to big AI and ICE, and she will say anything to avoid the questions she cannot answer.

While Conley was in a senior role at SOCOM, as indicated by her LinkedIn profile, Primer was awarded a multi-million dollar contract with SOCOM. This was all the way back in 2020.

Since at least 2025, Conley’s been on the take from Primer, raking in over $328,000 from them and Hidden Level, another AI company.

Then, in February, The Intercept and Politico reported on these payments from Primer and Hidden Level, two companies that partner with Palantir, the surveillance firm co-founded by billionaire Peter Thiel. Primer advertises the partnership on its own website, and so does Palantir. Palantir, in turn, holds the multimillion-dollar federal contract to build ImmigrationOS, the system ICE adopted to identify and track people for deportation in real time. Hidden Level feeds data into Palantir’s work. And a former Primer employee whose time at the company overlapped Conley’s publicly described positioning Primer’s AI platform across Customs and Border Protection, ICE, and federal law enforcement, building a multimillion-dollar pipeline and securing meetings with CBP leadership. The Judge Street Journal verified that person’s identity. Conley’s campaign would not say whether she worked with them.

What the record shows is that Cait Conley is on the payroll of a company that sells to ICE and publicly partners with the primary contractor assisting with mass deportations, and she will not tell voters what she does to earn that money. She has said she signed a nondisclosure agreement and cannot disclose what her work for Primer actually involves.

Lawler for Congress Campaign Manager Ciro Riccardi reacted to Conley’s deception:

“Cait Conley keeps shouting that she never worked for Palantir or ICE. The problem for her is that The Intercept, Politico, and her own disclosure show that two AI surveillance companies have paid her $328,000, and that her employer, Primer, advertises its Palantir partnership on its own website. At the same time, its salespeople brag online about pitching its technology to ICE and Customs and Border Protection. Cait Conley claims she signed an NDA that supposedly prevents her from telling voters what she does for them. Cait once worked to fight disinformation, but she is now misrepresenting reporting on her own record and begging the big-money groups she pretends to oppose to do it for her. So here are the questions, Cait. What does Primer pay you to do? Did you work with the Primer salesperson who was pitching your company’s AI to ICE? Why did you try to hide your latest disclosure until after voters had already cast their ballots? Why are you lying about your direct work with ICE and CBP?”

The hypocrisy goes further. Conley is endorsed by End Citizens United and casts herself as an anti-big-money outsider, yet she is backed by Democratic megadonor Stephen Mandel’s organization and is now, as mentioned above, using her redbox to call in outside money on her behalf. Her own Democratic opponents have raised the same concerns. Beth Davidson has repeatedly raised concerns about Cait Conley’s AI work and connections with ICE, and former candidates Peter Chatzky and John Sullivan cited both that work and Conley’s reaction to fair questions when they endorsed Davidson instead.

Cait Conley says she has nothing to hide. But until she answers some basic questions, Hudson Valley Democrats are right to ask why a candidate who runs on transparency is keeping her own paychecks from AI companies that partner with ICE and Palantir secret while asking super PACs to bail her out.
 

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