Tech Employees Are Rallying Against Their Companies' Work With ICE

On June 17th, Salesforce CEO Marc Benioff retweeted images from a CBS reporter of a detention facility in McAllen, Texas where children slept on the floor, covered in emergency blankets. Just a few days later, Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella sent an all-staff email calling President Donald Trump's immigration policy "cruel and abusive." In March, Beinoff's company signed a contract with US Customs and Border Patrol (CBP) to provide cloud services in order to boost the agency's hiring efforts, something that CBP has long struggled with. And at Microsoft, employees have organized to demand that Microsoft cancel its $19.4 million contract with Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) for data processing and, potentially, facial recognition software. An NBC investigation also identified active contracts between ICE and a host of prominent tech companies--Hewlett Packard Enterprise, Thomson Reuters, Motorola Solutions, and Palantir--each worth tens of millions.