In the US and EU, Immigration Customs Enforcement and Frontex carry out the everyday enforcement of xenophobic immigration policies. But they’re not alone: tech companies like Microsoft and Salesforce are equipping immigration police with the tools they rely on to track, identify, and incarcerate migrants and asylum seekers.
While Trump’s immigration enforcement agencies continue to make headlines around the world for their enforcement of his heartless immigration policy, many tech giants like Microsoft are complicit. Despite the widespread outrage and plea from employees to cancel its contract with ICE, Microsoft continues to equip ICE with surveillance technologies that it claims makes the immigration agency's operation more "efficient."
Call on Microsoft and other tech companies to renounce their contracts with ICE and Frontex and stop profiting from the wave of xenophobia sweeping Europe and the US.
Microsoft isn’t the only one: Salesforce offers cloud services to ICE, and LinkedIn has a contract with ICE that grants the agency “unlimited library access.” In Europe, Frontex relies on Microsoft BI, a data analytics software, to manage its databases.
In a time when governments across the world have embraced a xenophobic nationalism, we need to insist that companies like Microsoft say no to anti-immigrant policies.
Tell Microsoft and Salesforce: don’t let your tech and services be used to separate families.
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Time. 27 June 2018.