Palantir, the CIA-backed data-mining firm co-founded by Donald Trump’s ally Peter Thiel, became the target of an online protest organized by tech activists against the company’s work with US immigration authorities.

On Saturday morning, activists with the Tech Workers Coalition began flooding Palantir’s page on Github with reports on the US government’s use of Palantir technology to target immigrants and unaccompanied children.

An open software development program, Github allows outside parties to flag “issues” with sites and platforms and requires employees at those sites and platforms to review the problems. The effort was intended as an online equivalent to passing out flyers to employees, alerting them to what their company is doing in hopes they speak out against it.

Noah Gordon, a tech worker in New York who participated in the action, said he was heartened to see as many as 40 people raise issues on the site.

“If Palantir’s going to profit from the work of the open-source community, then we’re going to make sure we, as a community, have a say in who they work with,” he said. “And this is just the start.”

Protesters raised issues on Github to alert tech workers of Palantir’s involvement with Ice. Photograph: Screengrab/Github

He added that the activists chose the Microsoft-owned Github as a space for the protest because “it’s a space we all share”.

In April, Microsoft workers used Github to stand in solidarity with tech workers in China who have been using it as a forum to discuss labor violations.

Through a $38m contract with the Department of Homeland Security, Palantir’s Investigative Case Management software, which tracks the immigration status and whereabouts of people entering the US by collecting large amounts of data on them, has facilitated hundreds of arrests by Immigration and Customs Enforcement (Ice), documents exposed by a Freedom of Information request and reported on by the Intercept showed.

A Palantir spokesman previously said that while the company does work with the homeland security department, it does not work with the directorate of enforcement and removal operations and thus is not involved with the detention or deportation of immigrants. Palantir did not respond to request for comment on Monday.

The action of the Tech Workers Coalition this weekend follows continuing work from not-for-profit and activist groups to put an end to Palantir’s collaboration with US immigration services.

For several weeks, the Tech Workers Coalition and the Latinx organizing group Mijente have been spreading pamphlets outside Palantir offices in New York City, Washington DC and Palo Alto, California. On Monday, both groups distributed pamphlets in front of the company’s offices in all three cities.

The activists said Palantir had quickly removed many of this weekend’s online protests from its Github page.

“It’s clear to us that Palantir is not interested in allowing this conversation to happen, judging by how quickly they deleted our issues and blocked our ability to comment on their code,” Gordon said. “But we’re confident that the workers at Palantir now know they have our support in demanding an end to their company’s contracts with Ice.”