The head of U.S. immigration and border patrol has hit back at Google employees who are petitioning for the tech giant to stop working with them over human rights violations.
‘That kind of rhetoric frustrating. It’s absolutely irresponsible, it’s misinformed, it’s not factual and a lot of it is just straight out lies.’ U.S Border and Custom Protection Commissioner Mark Morgan said Saturday of the petition.
Morgan visited a detention facility in El Paso, Texas, Thursday and told Fox & Friends: ‘Let me tell the American people what the truth is. I just returned from El Paso…and what the truth is … they’re going to see that these families and children are receiving hot meals.
‘You’re going to see children set in front of flat-screen TV’s, watching cartoons. They’re getting medical attention. That’s the truth. This kind of rhetoric is irresponsible, reckless and a lie.’
U.S Border and Custom Protection Commissioner Mark Morgan called Google employees’ petition to stop working with ICE irresponsible, reckless and a lie
Wednesday’s petition compares assisting border enforcement to aiding the Nazis in the Holocaust
Morgan’s remarks came in response to an angry petition made public Wednesday by Google employees that demanded that the company not provide any services to Immigration and Customs Enforcement, Customs and Border Protection, and the Office of Refugee Resettlement.
At least 950 Google employees signed the petition demanding 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.
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.’
Morgan (left) visited a detention facility in El Paso, Texas, Thursday and said ‘These families and children are receiving hot meals. That’s the truth’
A petition signed by at least 950 Google employees demands the company refuse to provide any services to ICE and Border Patrol
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.
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.
A chart shows border apprehensions for this year in red, as well as for the past five years
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.