#NoTechForICE (Mijente, 2018–ongoing)

#NoTechForICE is Mijente's ongoing U.S. grassroots campaign — launched alongside the 23 October 2018 Mijente, National Immigration Project, and Immigrant Defense Project report Who's Behind ICE? The Tech and Data Companies Fueling Deportations — demanding that Palantir, Amazon Web Services, Microsoft, Salesforce, Northrop Grumman, LexisNexis, Thomson Reuters, Clearview AI, and the other named corporate contractors in the U.S. immigration-enforcement supply chain end their federal contracts with U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) and Customs and Border Protection (CBP). The campaign operates simultaneously as a hashtag-and-brand, the #NoTechForICE framing through which tech-worker, student, faith, and immigrant-rights coalition pressure is convened, and a multi-front organising programme whose articulated five-point agenda — exposing tech's outsized role in law enforcement, educating communities, taking direct action, organising with tech workers and students, and targeting specific named contractors — has remained the campaign's working architecture across the Trump 1.0 administration, the Biden administration, and into the Trump 2.0 administration. The campaign's principal in-corpus carriage runs through the Take Back Tech convening series — the July 2019 inaugural San Jose summit Mijente co-organised with the then-Center for Media Justice and the Tech Workers Coalition, and the 2024 Chicago and 2026 Atlanta editions co-anchored with MediaJustice — and through the campaign's direct downstream lineage into the 2021 No Tech For Apartheid campaign, which explicitly modelled its name on #NoTechForICE three years later.

Founding: the Who's Behind ICE? report

The campaign's seed was the October 2018 report Who's Behind ICE? The Tech and Data Companies Fueling Deportations — commissioned by Mijente, the National Immigration Project, and the Immigrant Defense Project and researched by Empower LLC. The report mapped the federal-contracting and data-broker supply chain through which Silicon Valley firms had become operational partners in U.S. immigration enforcement: Palantir's Investigative Case Management (ICM) and FALCON systems supplying ICE's case-management and database-querying infrastructure; Amazon Web Services' federal-data hosting authorisations and biometric-data systems; the LexisNexis and Thomson Reuters commercial data products through which ICE purchased the personal records of immigrants; and the Microsoft Azure, Salesforce, and Northrop Grumman cloud and integration services routing into Department of Homeland Security operations. The report's working argument — that ICE could not develop or operate its information systems without the technology industry's products and services, and that "sanctuary city" protections become ineffective when local law enforcement uses Palantir systems that feed information to ICE — supplied the campaign with its substantive ground. The campaign-and-hashtag #NoTechForICE was operationalised alongside the report's release as Mijente's public-facing organising vehicle for the demand that tech companies end their contracts with ICE and CBP.

Campaign architecture: the multi-front model

The campaign's working architecture — articulated across its five named goals (exposing tech's outsized role in law enforcement, educating communities, taking direct action, organising with tech workers and students, targeting specific named companies) — operates as a multi-front model in which different organising bases are invited into the campaign through different pressure registers, each calibrated to the access and authority that base holds over the named corporate contractors:

• A tech-worker dissent track inside the contracting companies themselves — anonymous worker letters, internal petitions, all-hands confrontations, and public-resignation-driven exits — which has carried the framing inside Palantir, Amazon, Microsoft, and Salesforce.
• A student-organising track in U.S. and U.K. computer-science programmes, organised around the campus pledge that asks STEM students to refuse Palantir employment until the company ends its ICE contracts, and around on-campus actions targeting Palantir's career-fair recruitment, campus speaker visits, and university sponsorship arrangements.
• A faith and civil-liberties coalition track that has carried the broader coalition pressure outside the firms themselves, including the sponsorship-drop campaigns at academic conferences, tech-industry conferences, and corporate-partnership relationships.
• A direct-action track at corporate events, shareholder meetings, and the contracting companies' public-facing venues — staged by Mijente, by the campaign's coalition partners, and (where the participation register permits) jointly.
• An immigrant-rights and Latinx political-home organising base that supplies the campaign's grounding constituency and the lived experience anchor through which the campaign's analytical position is held.

The multi-front model was a deliberate design decision — the campaign's working theory is that ICE's information infrastructure is a federation of corporate suppliers rather than a single contractor's product, and that the corporate-complicity argument therefore holds at the level of the supply chain rather than at any single contract. The five tracks are designed to be mutually reinforcing rather than substitutable: the tech-worker register and the student register operate inside the same corporate targets at different career stages; the academic-sponsorship and the corporate-shareholder registers operate at the same target through different stakeholder-authority channels; the immigrant-rights register supplies the constituency on whose behalf the campaign speaks.

Corporate targets and the Palantir anchor

The campaign's principal corporate target has been Palantir Technologies — the Peter-Thiel-co-founded data-analytics firm whose ICE contracting work has been the campaign's most legible single anchor. Palantir's Investigative Case Management (ICM) system is described in U.S. government procurement documents as "mission critical" to ICE's investigations infrastructure; it allows ICE agents to scour regional, local, state, and federal databases to build profiles of immigrants, and was used at the U.S. southern border to investigate the families and sponsors of unaccompanied children — a 90-day operation that resulted in the arrests of at least 443 people. Palantir's FALCON system is the case-management tool used by agents leading workplace raids; the August 2019 Mississippi workplace-deportation raid, the largest single-state workplace raid in over a decade, was executed using FALCON and produced 700 arrests across seven food-processing facilities. The two Palantir products together — ICM for investigations and FALCON for raids — supply the operational infrastructure on which a substantial fraction of ICE's information-driven enforcement depends, and have therefore been the corporate-target anchor on which the campaign has staged most of its named pressure.

The campaign's other named targets — Amazon Web Services, Microsoft Azure, Salesforce, LexisNexis, Thomson Reuters, Clearview AI, Northrop Grumman, and Google — are positioned as a single supply chain rather than as separately addressed cases, and the campaign has staged actions, shareholder-meeting confrontations, and worker-letter campaigns at each. The campaign's current Trump 2.0 target roster names Dell and Hewlett-Packard alongside the original cohort as companies pursuing federal contracts for the Trump administration's "detention and deportation machine".

2018–2019: from research artefact to operational programme

The campaign's first thirteen months — October 2018 to November 2019 — established the campaign's working organising shape and produced its earliest documented institutional wins. The chronological arc:

• October 2018: Who's Behind ICE? report release — the evidentiary foundation. The campaign and the hashtag #NoTechForICE launched alongside the report.
• 5 June 2019: UC Berkeley Privacy Law Scholars Conference severed its eight-year Palantir sponsorship under pressure from open letters signed by hundreds of academics. The campaign's earliest documented institutional-sponsorship win.
• 26–28 July 2019: Take Back Tech I San Jose — the inaugural convening of the U.S. grassroots tech-justice field, co-organised by Mijente, the then-Center for Media Justice, and the Tech Workers Coalition. The convening assembled the coalition shape on which the campaign's autumn-2019 organising programmes were staged.
• August 2019: the Mississippi workplace-deportation raid — the largest single-state workplace raid in over a decade, executed using Palantir's FALCON system, producing 700 arrests. The raid supplied the operational-harm anchor against which the autumn-2019 campus-organising wave was timed.
• 16 September 2019: the campus-pledge programme's public launch — 1,200 student signatories across seventeen universities at announcement, citing the 1960s student campaign against Dow Chemical recruitment over the company's manufacture of napalm for the Vietnam War as the explicit historical-organising precedent.
• 19 November 2019: the #NoTechForICE national student day of action — sixteen U.S. and U.K. universities ran coordinated on-campus protests against Palantir's recruitment presence. Cumulative pledge signatures reached 2,500 across 30 campuses; Palantir cancelled an on-campus recruitment session at UC Berkeley under pressure from 700 student-and-faculty petition signatories; hackathon-sponsorship drops ran at Duke and Yale; Brown temporarily halted its corporate partnership.
• 27 November 2019: ICE renewed the Palantir Investigative Case Management contract — an extension worth tens of millions of dollars across multiple subsequent option years — the moment that consolidated #NoTechForICE's strategic posture toward Palantir as a continuing, contract-by-contract pressure target rather than a single-decision campaign.

By the close of the 2019 calendar year the campaign had moved from research artefact to operational multi-front grassroots organising vehicle: a published evidentiary archive, an assembled coalition, a national student-pledge programme with thousands of signatories, a documented record of institutional and corporate-side wins, and a clear set of named corporate targets against which the campaign's continuing year-on-year pressure could be staged.

2020–2024: convening cadence and the corpus's lineage moment

The 2020–2024 window of the campaign carried the framing forward through the COVID-19 pandemic, the Biden administration, and the post-pandemic reset of the U.S. grassroots tech-justice convening line. Documented threads from this window:

• The campaign continued the campus-pledge programme and the student-pledge cohort grew to 3,000+ signatories across 35+ U.S. and U.K. campuses, with U.K. expansion through Edinburgh, Oxford, and St Andrews complementing the earlier U.S. cohort.
• Documented sponsorship-drop wins from the wider campaign-pressure period include Lesbians Who Tech and the Grace Hopper Conference (three days apart) dropping Palantir as a sponsor under campaign pressure.
• The campaign is credited as a contributing factor in Palantir's 2020 corporate-headquarters relocation from Palo Alto to Denver — the most-cited corporate-side reputation outcome attributed to the campaign.
• The 2021 launch of the No Tech For Apartheid campaign — the Project Nimbus tech-worker dissent campaign against Google and Amazon's cloud contracting with the Israeli military — explicitly modelled its name on #NoTechForICE and drew its student-pledge programme architecture, on-campus career-fair tactics, anonymous-worker-letter form, and sponsorship-pressure register from the #NoTechForICE documented organising shape. The downstream propagation is the campaign's most durable single legacy.
• Take Back Tech II Chicago (21–23 June 2024) — the first post-pandemic Take Back Tech and the moment at which the convening line resumed at scale. The Chicago edition's Friday opening Genocide, Powered by Tech plenary, anchored by No Tech For Apartheid organiser Mohammad Khatami on Palestine and the Israeli use of automated targeting, carried the #NoTechForICE / No Tech For Apartheid lineage as a single organising tradition into the convening's substantive frame; the Sunday closing Resisting Borders and Technologies of Violence plenary, anchored by Mijente Policy Director Jacinta González, carried the immigration-enforcement borderlands frame forward.

2025–ongoing: Trump 2.0 and ImmigrationOS

The April 2025 ICE award of a $30 million contract to Palantir to build ImmigrationOS — a comprehensive AI-driven surveillance and deportation-logistics platform — has reframed the campaign's operating environment. The ImmigrationOS platform is designed for three named functions: streamlining the identification and apprehension of individuals prioritised for removal; tracking and reporting self-deportations with near-real-time visibility; and improving deportation-logistics efficiency. Palantir is contracted to deliver a prototype by 25 September 2025; the contract runs through September 2027. The platform's data-aggregation architecture is built to pull from passport records, Social Security files, IRS tax data, and license-plate-reader data, with the goal of supplying agencies a comprehensive AI-driven profile of individuals on which faster enforcement decisions can be made. The conflict-of-interest dimension that the campaign has named is that Stephen Miller — the Trump administration's chief architect of immigration policy — holds a substantial financial stake in Palantir.

The campaign's continuing 2025-era organising programme — as carried by Mijente — is built around: organising locally and nationally to end data-broker contracts with ICE; closing the information-sharing loopholes between ICE and local governments; tracking how ICE is deploying AI to power its deportation machine; and urging municipalities to commit to robust sanctuary protections without loopholes. The campaign's target-list update names Dell and Hewlett-Packard alongside Palantir, Amazon, Microsoft, and Salesforce as the named corporate contractors pursuing federal contracts for the Trump 2.0 detention and deportation machine. The campaign's running argument — that the named contractors' federal-contracting infrastructure is what makes mass deportation operationally possible at scale, and that withdrawing from those contracts is a corporate-decision register on which tech-worker, student, and shareholder pressure remains the most legible single lever — has carried forward from the 2018–2019 founding period into the present.

Coalition and convening structure

Mijente has carried #NoTechForICE as a single-organisation-led campaign rather than as a coalition campaign — the campaign's lead, framing, programmatic decisions, and public-facing voice are Mijente's, and Mijente staff (notably Jacinta González as Senior Campaign Organizer through the campaign's first decade) have been the campaign's named organisers. The campaign's coalition shape operates at the level of participating organisations rather than co-lead organisations: the National Immigration Project and the Immigrant Defense Project as the Who's Behind ICE? report's co-commissioning partners; the Tech Workers Coalition as the inaugural Take Back Tech co-organiser and the continuing tech-worker-side bridge; the named campus-coalition partner organisations (Cal Bears Against ICE at UC Berkeley, the Young Democratic Socialists of America chapter at Georgia Tech, Casa San Jose at Carnegie Mellon, and others) as the student-side participating partners; and MediaJustice as the standing co-anchor of the Take Back Tech convening series through which the campaign's coalition-side meeting infrastructure runs. The convening-side complement is the corpus's principal index of the campaign's coalition reach — the 2024 Chicago Take Back Tech roster (the Stop LAPD Spying Coalition, the Carceral Tech Resistance Network, Accountable Tech, the Advancement Project, Just Futures Law, and the Athena Coalition) supplies a working snapshot of the field-shape the campaign has built around.

Place in the corpus

#NoTechForICE sits in the make-AI-good corpus as the campaign-entity anchor for the #NoTechForICE framing and as the founding instance of the corpus's U.S. tech-worker-conscience and student-pledge organising tradition against corporate federal contractors. Three connected ways the campaign matters to the wider corpus:

First, it is the U.S. movement-side template through which tech-worker dissent against corporate complicity in state violence is held as a coherent organising posture. The campaign's documented organising shape — campus-pledge programmes, on-campus career-fair actions, anonymous-worker-letter campaigns, sponsorship-drop pressure on academic and civic-institution sponsors, shareholder-meeting confrontations, faith-and-civil-liberties coalition mobilisations — was drawn on as a template by the 2021 No Tech For Apartheid campaign, whose name signals the structural-affinity premise that the cross-border supply of cloud and AI infrastructure to a state-violence system is the same kind of corporate-complicity problem #NoTechForICE treats the supply of data-broker and case-management infrastructure to ICE. The two campaigns now sit as paired peers in the corpus's record of tech-worker conscience as a movement-organising posture.

Second, it is the principal U.S. Latinx-led grassroots anchor of the surveillance-tech-accountability movement area — the campaign through which Mijente has held the immigration-enforcement-and-tech-contracting node of U.S. grassroots tech-justice organising as a sustained multi-year programme rather than as a single-cycle policy push. The campaign's continuing operational status across Trump 1.0, the Biden administration, and Trump 2.0 — and its evolving named corporate-target roster, organising-programme content, and coalition-partner shape across that span — supplies the corpus's clearest single case study of how a U.S. grassroots tech-justice campaign holds itself together across administrations whose enforcement priorities and political-cycle salience have shifted.

Third, it is the campaign-entity anchor for the surveillance-tech-and-immigration-enforcement node of the U.S. corpus, supplying the campaign-side container around which the corpus's existing #NoTechForICE message, campus-actions event, Take Back Tech I event, and Take Back Tech II event entries are now anchored. The campaign closes a structural gap the corpus had previously held only through the message, event, and organisational anchor entries — the campaign-typed multi-year container entity that holds the campaign's full operational timeline, named outcomes, and ongoing programmatic frame.