Mijente, the National Immigration Project of the NLG, and the Immigrant Defense Project announce, “Who’s Behind ICE? The Tech Companies Fueling Deportations.” This report focuses on how tech companies and contracts are fueling immigration enforcement and highlights the long history of the technology industry’s “revolving door” relationship with federal agencies, how the technology industry and its products and services are now actually circumventing city- and state-level protections for vulnerable communities, and what we can do to expose and hold these actors accountable.
Our organizations commissioned Empower LLC to undertake critical research about the multi-layered technology infrastructure behind the accelerated and expansive immigration enforcement we’re seeing today, and the companies that are behind it. The report opens a window into the Department of Homeland Security’s (DHS) plans for immigration policing through a scheme of tech and database policing, the mass scale and scope of the tech-based systems, the contracts that support it, and the connections between Washington, D.C., and Silicon Valley. It surveys and investigates the key contracts that technology companies have with DHS, particularly within Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE), and their success in signing new contracts through intensive and expensive lobbying.
Visit Mijente’s site to see the amazing resources Mijente has created to support campaigns fighting the increasingly close collaboration between tech companies and ICE.