Google employees demand that the tech giant refuse any contracts with ICE and Border Patrol over ‘human rights violations’
- A petition signed by at least 738 Google employees was made public Thursday
- Demands company refuse to provide any services to ICE and Border Patrol
- Compares assisting border enforcement to aiding the Nazis in the Holocaust
Google employees have demanded that the company not provide any services to Immigration and Customs Enforcement, Customs and Border Protection, and the Office of Refugee Resettlement.
In an angry petition made public on Wednesday, the employees demanded that the tech giant publicly commit to refuse any contracts with the immigration and border enforcement agencies.
‘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,’ the petition read.
‘We refuse to be complicit. It is unconscionable that Google, or any other tech company, would support agencies engaged in caging and torturing vulnerable people,’ it continued.
Google employees are seen protesting the Trump administration’s travel ban in 2017. Hundreds have now signed a petition demanding that the company not work with CBP
A Google spokesman did not immediately respond to a request for comment from DailyMail.com
Google is a major cloud computing provider, with competitors including Amazon and Microsoft, and has sought to expand its government contacts in recent years.
The petition cites reports that CBP is preparing to request bids on a massive cloud computing contract, and goes on to demand that Google not participate in the bidding.
It also compares assisting border enforcement agencies to ‘working with the Nazis during the Holocaust.’
The petition claims that ICE and CBP are in ‘grave violation of international human rights law’ and that working with those agencies would threaten Google’s ‘diverse, inclusive, and psychologically safe workplace.’
Critics of the Trump administration have lambasted unsanitary and crowded conditions in facilities used to detain and process people who cross the border illegally.
The administration’s defenders say that the system is overwhelmed by a massive influx of illegal migrants, and that agencies are coping as best they can within limited budgets.
In this file photo taken on March 20, 2019 a group of about 30 Brazilian migrants, who had just crossed the border illegally, sit on the ground near US Border Patrol agents in New Mexico
A chart shows border apprehensions for this year in red, as well as for the past five years
Last month, CBP reported more than 82,000 people crossed the border illegally or were deemed inadmissible at ports of entry, more than double the number from the same period a year ago.
Google is not the first company to face similar demands from employees. Last month, Amazon employees were in revolt over their company’s sale of services to a data mining company that works with ICE.
An internal email circulated at Amazon demanding Amazon drop Palantir as an Amazon Web Services customer.
It is also the latest in a long line of employee protests at Google, which a recent report indicated is being increasingly held hostage by its ‘woke’ workforce.
Google last year dropped out of the bidding for a huge Pentagon cloud computing contract that could be worth up to $10 billion after a protest by employees urging the company to stay out of the business of war.
Google employees have also challenged the company on issues including sexual harassment in the workplace and the potential tailoring of a version of its online search engine for use on China’s heavily censored internet.