#NoTechForICE National Student Day of Action (19 November 2019)

On Tuesday 19 November 2019, students at sixteen universities across the United States and the United Kingdom staged a coordinated #NoTechForICE day of action against Palantir Technologies — the Peter-Thiel-co-founded data-analytics firm whose Investigative Case Management (ICM) and FALCON systems supply the case-management infrastructure routing into U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) operations. The coordinated wave was organised by Mijente, the Latinx and Chicanx national grassroots membership organisation, around the campaign's working theory that Palantir's top-university recruitment pipeline was the corporate target's load-bearing dependency, and was timed against the FALCON contract's 27 November 2019 ICE renewal deadline. The day was the first coordinated multi-campus international action of the #NoTechForICE student-organising wave; it followed the campaign's 16 September 2019 launch of the on-campus pledge programme across an opening seventeen-university cohort, and the July 2019 Take Back Tech I summit in San Jose at which the convening-side coalition shape had been assembled.

Context

The November day of action landed inside a thirteen-month window in which the #NoTechForICE campaign had run from research artefact to operational student-organising programme. Mijente, the National Immigration Project, and the Immigrant Defense Project had released Who's Behind ICE? The Tech and Data Companies Fueling Deportations in October 2018 — the evidentiary record that had mapped the federal-contracting and data-broker supply chain routing Palantir's ICM and FALCON systems, Amazon Web Services' federal-data hosting, and the LexisNexis, Thomson Reuters, Microsoft, Salesforce, and Northrop Grumman commercial routes into ICE enforcement. UC Berkeley's Privacy Law Scholars Conference had severed its eight-year Palantir sponsorship in June 2019 under pressure from hundreds of academics — the campaign's earliest documented institutional-sponsorship win. The 26–28 July 2019 Take Back Tech I summit in San Jose had assembled the coalition shape (Mijente, the then-Center for Media Justice, the Tech Workers Coalition, and a wider partner roster) and supplied the convening-side meeting point at which the campaign's organising tendencies were put in the same room. The campaign's 16 September 2019 launch announcement had then opened the student-pledge programme to public signatures — 1,200 signatures 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 — and the August 2019 Mississippi workplace-deportation raid (700 arrests, executed using Palantir's FALCON case-management system) had supplied the operational-harm anchor against which the November contract-renewal deadline was set.

What happened on the day

Sixteen campuses ran coordinated actions on Tuesday 19 November 2019. At UC Berkeley, the student coalition Cal Bears Against ICE — anchored by then-undergraduate math major Olivia Nouriani — rallied against Palantir's on-campus presence and the university's $20,000-a-year corporate partnership with the firm; 700 students and faculty had signed a precursor petition pressuring the university, and Palantir cancelled an on-campus recruitment session under the pressure. At Carnegie Mellon, graduate students Bonnie Fan and Maggie Oates led an on-campus action gathering 230+ signatures on a petition demanding the university bar Palantir from campus recruitment and sever ties with the firm; Fan framed the action as "not just about being noisy" but "about educating", and the Pittsburgh Latinx-immigrant-rights organisation Casa San Jose joined the CMU coalition. At Georgia Tech, PhD student Ezra Goss and the campus Young Democratic Socialists of America chapter ran a campus action targeting Palantir's recruitment presence ("I have a vested interest in making sure tech isn't unethical. Palantir is a huge recruiter on our campus"). At Stanford, students targeted the university's $24,000-a-year Palantir corporate partnership. Hackathon-sponsorship-drop actions ran at Duke and Yale, where student-run hackathons severed Palantir as a sponsor under organising pressure; Brown temporarily halted a $15,000-a-year corporate partnership. The wider US-and-UK cohort — running across Oxford, Cambridge, the University of Chicago, and the named pledge-cohort universities Edinburgh, St Andrews, Harvard, MIT, Wellesley, Tufts, Cornell, the Claremont Colleges, Cooper Union, the University of San Francisco, UCLA, UC Davis, Santa Clara, Puget Sound, RPI, Appalachian State, Belmont, and the University of Washington and others — fed the coordinated tally of 16 universities on the day and the cumulative 2,500-signature pledge across 30 campuses the campaign reported at the moment of the action.

Significance

The November 2019 day of action is the corpus's earliest coordinated multi-campus international student day of action against a tech-industry federal contractor and the founding instance of the #NoTechForICE student-organising form. It is structurally distinct from the corpus's single-site protest entries (e.g. the August 2020 Westminster Ofqual A-level protest, the July 2013 Stop Killer Robots London launch): the unit of coordination is the campus-network rather than the city-block, the coordinating organisation supplies the framing and the pressure target rather than the convening venue, and the day's tactical register operates inside the recruitment-pipeline architecture of the corporate target rather than at the venue of a single state institution. The coordinated multi-campus form has since been carried forward in the corpus through PauseAI's coordinated international day of action ahead of the Seoul AI Summit (May 2024) — a different movement register and a different pressure target, but recognisably the same artefact-shape: a one-day coordinated multi-site mobilisation organised by a single coordinating body around a targeted external decision-deadline.

The day's tactical premise — that Palantir's recruitment dependence on top-university computer-science programmes was the campaign's load-bearing pressure point — registered three documented institutional outcomes on or immediately following the day: Palantir's cancellation of an on-campus recruitment session at UC Berkeley, the hackathon-sponsorship drops at Duke and Yale, and Brown's temporary halt of its corporate partnership. The FALCON-renewal deadline itself the day was timed against was not stopped — ICE renewed the Palantir contract eight days later — and the campaign's post-November posture toward Palantir consolidated as a continuing contract-by-contract pressure target rather than a single-decision campaign. The day's downstream lineage on the worker-and-student-organising side runs into the 2021 Project Nimbus No Tech For Apartheid campaign, which explicitly modelled its name on #NoTechForICE and drew its student-pledge programme architecture, on-campus career-fair tactics, and sponsorship-pressure register from the November 2019 day of action's documented organising shape.

Place in the corpus

The day sits as the corpus's first coordinated multi-campus international day of action in the events register, and as the campus-and-recruitment-pipeline-side counterpart to the July 2019 Take Back Tech I San Jose summit's convening-and-coalition-side anchoring of the same campaign. It is the corpus's first Event entry to take "the corporate target's tech-talent recruitment pipeline" as the pressure surface — a tactical register the corpus also tracks through the Project Nimbus tech-worker letter campaigns under msg-no-tech-for-apartheid — and the first Event entry whose participating-site footprint runs across the US and UK simultaneously rather than through a single national civil-society field. The cadence the entry anchors — the October 2018 Who's Behind ICE? report, the June 2019 Berkeley Privacy Law Scholars Conference sponsorship drop, the July 2019 Take Back Tech I convening, the September 2019 student-pledge launch, and the November 2019 coordinated day of action — supplies the documented organising arc through which the #NoTechForICE campaign moved from research artefact to operational multi-front grassroots organising vehicle in thirteen months.