Denouncing The Tech Industry’s Support For Detention, Deportation, & Family Separation
Alex Burnett
October 22, 2019
In the past month, thousands of demonstrators staged dozens of internationally acclaimed protests across the United States. These protesters demanded major tech companies, such as Amazon and Palantir Technologies, cut ties with Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE), Customs and Border Protection (CBP), and the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) because of their role enforcing the Trump administration’s white supremacist and xenophobic immigration policies.
On Thursday, September 5, approximately 1,000 protestors organized by the Jewish activist group Never Again Action marched from the New England Holocaust Memorial to Amazon’s Cambridge Headquarters. Outside of Amazon’s headquarters, they unfurled banners and gave speeches denouncing Amazon’s widely documented relationship with ICE, which protestors compared to IBM’s role in assisting Nazi Germany during the Holocaust. Less than one week later, a coalition of Latinx and Jewish organizations, including Mijente and Jews for Economic and Racial Justice, rallied outside Palantir’s New York and San Francisco offices. Together they called for the multi-billion dollar tech giant to end its $49 million contact with ICE.
As anti-ICE demonstrations intensify and the Trump administration’s immigration policies become even deadlier, Catholics should heed the Gospel’s to “love thy neighbor” and demand that tech giants stop profiting from federal agencies that terrorize, torture, and attack immigrants.
Many immigrant justice organizers including Movimiento Cosecha, ICE Out of L.A., and other organization have repeatedly denounced the tech industry’s support for ICE’s deadly raids and CBP’s “filthy” concentration camps. Outrage swelled after the Immigrant Defense Project, Mijente, Empower LLC, and The National Immigration Project published their October 2018 report, “Who’s Behind ICE?” In this 74-page document, the authors outline how “a handful of huge corporations,” including Forensic Logic Inc. and Salesforce, annually receive billions of federal dollars in exchange for database services, case management software, fingerprinting technology, facial recognition software, and “social media analytics.” These tech services allow ICE agents to “surveil, track, and…deport immigrants” with ease.
Using the information from this report, Mijente, alongside thousands of university students, and workers at Salesforce and Amazon have disrupted dozens of recruitment events and press conferences to prevent companies that contract with ICE from conducting “business as usual.” As investigative journalist David Dayen explained in a 2018 article, “ICE relies on private contractors to carry out its detention operations, so one way to abolish ICE might be to make its association so toxic that it loses its collaborators.”
Pope Francis repeatedly calls for world leaders to build a “Hundreds of Catholic Sisters, Priests, Brothers, and lay people, including NETWORK’s own Sister Quincy Howard and Laura Peralta-Schulte, already answered this call by putting their bodies on the line to protest DHS’s illegal family separation policy. By shaming multi-billion dollar corporations that do business with ICE and CBP, Catholics can advance Pope Francis’s vision of a “moral economy” rooted in peace and love for our neighbors.