Google Employees Protest Proposed Contract With ICE, CBP

Employees of Google announced Wednesday they are protesting the tech giant’s expected proposal to work with President Donald Trump’s war on immigrants through cloud computing contracts.

In a detailed Medium post announcing concerns over the contract, the group “No GCP for CPB” laid out its complaints and demands (emphasis in original):

It has recently come to light that CBP is gearing up to request bids on a massive cloud computing contract. The winning cloud provider will be streamlining CBP’s infrastructure and facilitating its human rights abuses. It’s time to stand together again and state clearly that we will not work on any such contract. We demand that Google publicly commit not to support CBP, ICE, or ORR with any infrastructure, funding, or engineering resources, directly or indirectly, until they stop engaging in human rights abuses.

“We refuse to be complicit,” the group said.

We won’t be complicit: #NoGCPforCBP With this petition, we call on Google to publicly commit not to support CBP, ICE or ORR w/ any infrastructure, funding, or engineering resources, directly or indirectly, until they stop engaging in human rights abuses.https://t.co/8RITUXKJBq

— Googlers for Human Rights (@EthicalGooglers) August 14, 2019

The letter was signed, at press time, by “676 Googlers and 48 other supporters.”

As Vox reported Wednesday, employees have been at the forefront of movements against the country’s large tech sector cooperating with CBP and ICE:

In many cases, employees who consider themselves part of the “Tech Won’t Build It” and “No Tech for ICE” movement have been some of the first to raise concerns about their companies’ practices.

The movement to stop tech companies from supplying technology to ICE and other immigration agencies has also been led in part by immigrant and minority advocacy groups like Mijente and Jews for Racial & Economic Justice, the latter of which last week helped shut down an Amazon Books store in Manhattan over the company’s ties with ICE.

Other rights groups, including the Texas-based RAICES, applauded the stand taken by the tech giant employees.

“We appreciate the Google workers standing with us,” tweeted RAICES.

Mijente said it hoped that the Google group wouldn’t be the last.

“We encourage tech workers across all of these companies to keep organizing and escalate until their employers stop engaging in human rights abusers,” said Mijente.