Amazon Web Services spotlighted its work with a federal agency that handles immigration services Thursday during the company’s Public Sector Summit in D.C., with no sign of political protests roiling other tech companies that work with the government.
Politics was hardly discussed as officials from U.S. Customs and Immigration Services, a component of the Department of Homeland Security, addressed large and predominately male audiences in the Washington Convention Center.
“Regardless of what you have heard, we do provide the American dream to a lot of people,” Robert Brown, a USCIS cloud solutions developer and division chief, said during a talk with AWS employee Tim Anderson on integrating security into development processes.
Hundreds of people watched Brown and Anderson discuss organizational and coding strategy.
An hour earlier and across the hallway, USCIS official Sarah Fahden sat on a three-person panel with two local government employees, telling attendees that digitizing immigration-related paperwork will allow an “exponential” savings “across the DHS ecosystem” because multiple agencies use the records.
Fahden, the agency’s identity, records, and national security division chief, said USCIS was moving to streamline Alien Registration Number issuance.
“We have many A-numbers for a single person, and that’s because A-numbers are issued in more than one organization,” she said. “So this service is not going to just update USCIS, but it will happen at ICE and CBP and all the other organizations that use these networks that will then use this data and rely on this data. So it’s exponential the amount of savings that it will provide across the DHS ecosystem and even beyond that. It’s pretty exciting stuff.”
USCIS stores data in the AWS cloud, which offers applications to improve data processes. The agency does not arrest suspected illegal immigrants — a job for the more controversial Immigration and Customs Enforcement agency — but does share some information.
USCIS has many administrative roles, managing employment authorization for foreigners by issuing green cards and administering the E-Verify platform. The agency processes citizenship paperwork and reviews asylum and refugee status requests.
Fahden said that digitizing forms has resulted in labor reductions of 80-90 percent.
Amazon’s decision to showcase its work with USCIS comes as it is among the presumed frontrunners for a multibillion-dollar Pentagon cloud computing contract — and as employees at other major tech companies attempt to influence corporate policy.
Hundreds of employees at Microsoft have objected to the company’s work with ICE, amid the Trump administration’s “zero tolerance” policy of prosecuting adults accused of illegal border crossings, after Google dropped an artificial intelligence contract with the Pentagon this month over similar employee complaints.
