Google employees are circulating a petition urging the tech giant to forgo any opportunities to work with several federal agencies “engaged in caging and torturing vulnerable people.”
Google employees began circulating a petition online Wednesday. The petition accuses the U.S. Customs and Border Protection, Immigration and Customs Enforcement, and the Office of Refugee Resettlement of abusing illegal immigrants, and it demands that Google not work with any of the agencies.
The agencies “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,” the petition states. “These abuses are illegal under international human rights law, and immoral by any standard.”
Google employees launched the petition after CBP announced it was accepting bids from private companies to provide cloud services for the agency. Over 700 Google employees have signed the petition, along with over 50 former employees and others.
The petition compared Google working with the immigration agencies to IBM working with the Nazis. The petition cites Google’s principles for developing artificial intelligence and staying within “ethical guardrails.”
“History is clear: the time to say NO is now. We refuse to be complicit,” the petition says. “It is unconscionable that Google, or any other tech company, would support agencies engaged in caging and torturing vulnerable people.”
