More Than 880 employees and contractors working for Google signed a petition this week calling on the company to disclose and cancel any contracts it may have with US immigration authorities. In the letter unveiled on Friday, the workers said they are “vehemently opposed” to Google’s dealings with the Department of Homeland Security, which includes Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) and Customs and Border Protection (CBP).
“We object to the technology we build being used to power state violence around the world,” a Google software engineer, who declined to give their name out of fear of retaliation, told reporters on Friday.
“I stand to benefit from other people’s suffering, which I find abhorrent and I refuse to be a quiet participant in that system,” added a second Google staffer, who went by Alex.
Google declined to comment on the petition’s demands. But a company spokesperson, who requested anonymity out of fear for their safety, says the technologies at issue are basic computing and data storage that are available to any customer.
US immigration authorities have been under intense public scrutiny this year as the Trump administration ramped up its mass deportation campaign, sparking nationwide protests. In Minneapolis, confrontations between protesters and federal agents culminated in the fatal shooting of two US citizens by immigration officers. Both incidents were captured in widely disseminated videos and became a focal point of the backlash. In the wake of the uproar, the Trump administration and Congress say they are negotiating changes to ICE’s tactics.
Some of the Department of Homeland Security’s most lucrative contracts are for software and tech gear from a variety of different vendors. A small share of workers at some of those suppliers, including Google, Amazon, and Palantir, have raised concerns for years about whether the technology they are developing is being used for surveillance or to carry out violence.
In 2019, nearly 1,500 workers at Google signed a petition demanding that the tech giant suspend its work with Customs and Border Protection until the agency stopped engaging in what they said were human rights abuses. More recently, staff at Google’s AI unit asked executives to explain how they would prevent ICE from raiding their offices. (No answers were immediately provided to the workers.)
Employees at Palantir have also recently raised questions internally about the company’s work with ICE, WIRED reported. And over 1,000 people across the tech industry signed a letter last month urging businesses to dump the agency.
The tech companies have largely either defended their work for the federal government or pushed back on the idea that they are assisting it in concerning ways. Some government contracts run through intermediaries, making it challenging for workers to identify which tools an agency is using and for what purposes.
The new petition inside Google aims to renew pressure on the company to, at the very least, acknowledge recent events and any work it may be doing with immigration authorities. It was organized by No Tech for Apartheid, a group of Google and Amazon workers who oppose what they describe as tech militarism, or the integration of corporate tech platforms, cloud services, and AI into military and surveillance systems.
The petition specifically asks Google’s leadership to publicly call for the US government to make urgent changes to its immigration enforcement tactics and to hold an internal discussion with workers about the principles they consider when deciding to sell technology to state authorities. It also demands Google take additional steps to keep its own workforce safe, noting that immigration agents recently targeted an area near a Meta data center under construction.
Updated: 2/6/25, 12:00 pm EST: This story was updated with comments from two Google workers and a company spokesperson.
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