Google Employees Refuse to Work With ICE or Border Protection Agencies
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This week 1,293 Google and employees and 79 other supporters have pledged publicly not to support US Customs and Border Protection (CBP), ICE, or Office of Refugee Resettlement (ORR) with any infrastructure, funding, or engineering resources, directly or indirectly, until they stop engaging in human rights abuses. Not only that, the employees published the names of dissenters publicly online, and are asking for more supporters to sign the pledge!
If you want to add your name to the list of those who will not work for these government agencies until they stop their human rights abuses, you can email no.gcp.for.cbp@gmail.com from your institutional email address (preferred) with the subject line “support”. Include your name and affiliation, as you’d like it to appear on the list of signatories.
The Googlers full statement is bellow and you can see the original here:
Google must stand against human rights abuses: #NoGCPforCBP
US Customs and Border Protection (CBP) is currently engaged in human rights abuses at the US Southern border. Together with Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) and the Office of Refugee Resettlement (ORR), which is presently responsible for the housing of migrant children, they are caging and harming asylum seekers, separating children from parents, illegally detaining refugees and US citizens, and perpetrating a system of abuse and malign neglect that has led to the deaths of at least 7 children in detention camps. These abuses are illegal under international human rights law, and immoral by any standard.
In January of 2017 thousands of Googlers, including our executives, joined together to protest the Trump administration’s Muslim Ban. This was the right thing to do and we are proud to work at a place that reflects these values.
It has recently come to light that CBP is gearing up to request bids on a massive cloud computing contract. The winning cloud provider will be streamlining CBP’s infrastructure and facilitating its human rights abuses. It’s time to stand together again and state clearly that we will not work on any such contract. 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.
Google has repeatedly advertised its commitments to implementing ethical guardrails on its tech. Google’s AI Principles state that Google will not build technologies “whose purpose contravenes widely accepted principles of international law and human rights.” By any interpretation, CBP and ICE are in grave violation of international human rights law. The company has also pledged to create a diverse, inclusive, and psychologically safeworkplace for all its workers, including immigrants and Latinx people — the very populations whose communities, families, and friends are being terrorized by CBP and ICE.
In working with CBP, ICE, or ORR, Google would be trading its integrity for a bit of profit, and joining a shameful lineage. We have only to look to IBM’s role working with the Nazis during the Holocaust to understand the role that technology can play in automating mass atrocity.
History is clear: the time to say NO is now. 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. And we are not alone — the world is watching and the facts are clear. We stand with workers and advocates across the industry who are demanding that the tech industry refuse to provide the infrastructure for mass atrocity.
Signed,
1293 Googlers and 79 other supporters*
*We launched this petition publicly at the same time that we announced it within Google. We will be updating this post periodically as signatures are added. The list of signatures from Googlers and supporters is included below.
Academic, civil society, and industry supporters:
To add your name to the list of supporters:
- Email no.gcp.for.cbp@gmail.com from your institutional email address (preferred) with the subject line “support”
- Include your name and affiliation, as you’d like it to appear on the list of signatories.
Original Post appeared on Medium.
