| Dear Katy, ICE depends on Silicon Valley. Technology giants like Google, Amazon and Palantir help ICE supercharge its traumatizing operation and perform its racist mission more efficiently and brutally. The companies that choose to work with ICE in order to pad their pockets are complicit in the deaths and suffering that ICE creates.1 Fortunately, tech workers are fighting back. Right now, employees at GitHub, which was acquired by Microsoft about 1 year ago, are rising up to protest their company's decision to renew an ICE contract.2 We need to stand in solidarity and raise the pressure on GitHub and Microsoft's leadership to sever ties with ICE. Tell GitHub: #NoTechforICE. Don't be complicit in human rights abuse. Click here to sign the petition. The backlash started in September, when GitHub, a platform to share and collaborate on code, renewed a contract to license its technology to ICE. Like all Silicon Valley companies that work with ICE, GitHub's technological boost pours gasoline on the raging fires of ICE's human rights abuse. The last thing immigrant communities need is an ICE with more and better technology.3 GitHub's decision to renew ICE's contract makes the company complicit in ICE's outrages. Under pressure from employees, GitHub leadership pointed fingers at Microsoft.4 But leadership's claims that GitHub could not deviate from the position of its parent company ignored the possibility of advocating internally to cancel the contract. GitHub also made a donation to immigrant rights groups, following the shoddy example of Salesforce, which tried to buy its way out of the problem and faced a huge backlash. But as GitHub employees noted, no donation can make up the damage to families and children.5 What immigration agencies are doing at our border is in absolute violation of human rights and international law. By working with ICE, GitHub and Microsoft are supercharging Trump's war on immigrants and are continuing an ugly part of our history – during World War II, IBM directly supplied Nazis with technology used to transport millions of people to concentration camps.6 We must put a stop to this dangerous collaboration now. Tell GitHub: #NoTechforICE. Don't be complicit in human rights abuse. Click below to sign the petition: https://act.credoaction.com/sign/github-ice?t=9&akid=34509%2E12967895%2Eom-U1L Thank you for speaking out, Jelani Drew, Campaign Manager
CREDO Action from Working Assets Add your name: References: - Shirin Ghaffary, "GitHub is the latest tech company to face controversy over its contracts with ICE," Vox, Oct. 9, 2019.
- Ibid.
- Ibid.
- Joseph Cox and Janus Rose, "GitHub CEO Says It Has to Follow Microsoft's Lead on Working With ICE," VICE, Oct. 10, 2019.
- Ghaffary, "GitHub is the latest tech company to face controversy over its contracts with ICE."
- Colin Lecher, "Google employees 'refuse to be complicit' in border agency cloud contract," The Verge, Aug. 14, 2019.
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