More Than 800 Google Workers Urge Company to Cancel Any Contracts With ICE and CBP
More than 800 employees and contractors work for Google signed a petition this week calling on the company to disclose and cancel any contracts it may have US immigration authorities. In a statement, the workers said they are “firmly opposed” to Google's dealings with the Department of Homeland Security, which include Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) and Customs and Border Protection (CBP).
“We consider it the ethical and policy-bound responsibility of our leadership to disclose all contracts and partnerships with CBP and ICE and to withdraw from these partnerships,” states the petition published on Friday. Google did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
US immigration authorities have been under intense public scrutiny this year as the Trump administration ramped up its mass deportation campaign, sparking nationwide protests. In Minneapolis, confrontations between protesters and federal agents culminated in the fatal shooting of two American citizens by immigration officers. Both incidents were recorded in widely distributed videos and became a focal point of the backlash. In the wake of the uproar, the Trump administration and Congress say they are negotiating changes to ICE's tactics.
Some of the Department of Homeland Security's most lucrative contracts are up for grabs software and tech gear from a variety of different suppliers. A small number of workers at some of those suppliers, including Google, Amazon, and Palantir, have raised concerns for years about whether the technology they develop is used for surveillance or to carry out violence.
In 2019, almost 1,500 workers at Google signed a petition demanded that the tech giant suspend its work with Customs and Border Protection until the agency stopped engaging in what they said were human rights abuses. More recently, staff at Google's AI unit asked drivers to explain how they would prevent ICE from raiding their offices. (No answers were immediately provided to the workers.)
Employees at Palantir have also recently raised internal questions about the company's work with ICE, WIRED reported. And about 1,000 people about the tech industry signed a letter last month urging companies to ditch the agency.
The tech companies have largely either defended their work for the federal government or pushed back on the idea that they are helping it in relevant ways. Some government contracts run through intermediaries, making it challenging for workers to identify which tools an agency is using and for what purposes.
The new petition within Google aims to renew pressure on the company to, at least, recognize recent events and any work it can do with immigration authorities. It was organized by No Tech for Apartheid, a group of Google and Amazon workers which against what they describe as technical militarism, or the integration of corporate tech platforms, cloud services and AI into military and surveillance systems.
The petition specifically asks Google's leadership to publicly call on the US government to make urgent changes to its immigration enforcement tactics and to hold an internal discussion with workers about the principles they consider when deciding to sell technology to state authorities. It also demands that Google take extra steps to keep its own staff safe, noting that immigration agents recently targeted an area near a Meta data center under construction.
