No Tech For ICE

No Tech For ICE is the grassroots framing through which Mijente — a national Latinx and Chicanx organising hub — names tech-company complicity in U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement operations and convenes a tech-worker, student, faith, and immigrant-rights coalition against the federal contracts under which Silicon Valley firms supply the data-broker, case-management, cloud, and surveillance infrastructure routing into ICE and Customs and Border Protection enforcement. The framing operates simultaneously as the campaign's name, the hashtag #NoTechForICE through which the campaign's public-record output is indexed, and the substantive policy demand for Palantir, Amazon Web Services, Microsoft, Salesforce, and the other corporate contractors named in Mijente's foundational research to end their ICE and CBP contracts. Inside the corpus, the framing's principal carriage is the Take Back Tech convening series Mijente co-anchors with MediaJustice — including the 2019 inaugural San Jose summit and the 2024 Chicago edition — and the framing's direct lineage into the 2021 No Tech For Apartheid campaign, which explicitly modelled its name on #NoTechForICE.

Origin

The framing's seed was the 23 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 contracts through which cloud and integration services routed 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 framing 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; the campaign's working architecture was the multi-front model — tech-worker dissent inside the contracting companies, student-side pressure to disrupt the tech-talent pipeline, faith and civil-liberties coalition pressure, and direct-action confrontations at corporate events.

The Palantir anchor

The framing'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. ICE's August 2019 renewal of the Palantir contract — an extension worth tens of millions of dollars across multiple subsequent option years — was the moment that consolidated #NoTechForICE's strategic posture toward Palantir as a continuing, contract-by-contract pressure target rather than a single-decision campaign.

The framing'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 architecture matches the campaign's working theory that ICE's information infrastructure is a federation of corporate suppliers rather than a single contractor's product, and that the corporate-supply objection holds at the level of the supply chain rather than at any single contract.

Tactics: students, workers, sponsors

The framing's most distinctive tactic has been the campus tech-talent pipeline disruption. Mijente's student-organising programme invited STEM and computer-science students at U.S. and U.K. universities to pledge they would refuse Palantir employment until the company ended its ICE contracts — and translated the pledge into on-campus actions that targeted Palantir's career-fair recruitment, campus speaker visits, and university sponsorship arrangements. The campaign's November 2019 coordinated campus wave — protests at sixteen universities including Stanford, UC Berkeley, Georgia Tech, Yale, the University of Chicago, Oxford, and Cambridge — established the student-pledge framework as the campaign's signature tactic.

The framework produced one of the campaign's earliest documented institutional wins on 5 June 2019, when UC Berkeley's Privacy Law Scholars Conference — which had carried Palantir as a sponsor since 2011 — severed the sponsorship after hundreds of academics signed open letters pressuring the university over the ICE contracts. The win was tactically modest in financial terms but registered the campaign's strategic premise: that Palantir's continued dependence on the academic-and-research credibility supplied by U.S. and U.K. universities was a load-bearing reputational vulnerability the campaign could exploit without needing federal-contract leverage.

On the worker-dissent side, the framing has been carried by employee organising at Palantir, Amazon, Microsoft, and Salesforce — internal letters, all-hands confrontations, and resignations — and was the documented precedent the 2021 Google and Amazon workers' Project Nimbus open letter drew on when it framed the worker-side objection to cloud contracting with state-violence systems as a single organising lineage running from ICE through the U.S. Department of Defense to the Israeli military.

Carriage into the corpus

The framing's principal in-corpus carriage is the Take Back Tech convening series — the inaugural San Jose summit (26–28 July 2019) Mijente co-organised with the then-Center for Media Justice and the Tech Workers Coalition as "a people's summit to free our futures from surveillance and state violence", anchored on tech companies' role in profiting from criminal-justice and immigration-enforcement systems. The 2019 convening landed inside the same window as Mijente's #NoTechForICE direct-action campaign and built the convening's substantive frame on the data-and-policing supply chain through which Silicon Valley tech firms had become operational partners in U.S. carceral and immigration-enforcement infrastructure. The 2024 Chicago edition and 2026 Atlanta edition — co-anchored by MediaJustice and Mijente — have carried the framing forward into the corpus's post-pandemic U.S. tech-justice convening line.

The framing's downstream lineage is msg-no-tech-for-apartheid. The 2021 No Tech For Apartheid campaign explicitly modelled its name on #NoTechForICE — the lineage the name signals is structural: the campaign treats the cross-border supply of cloud and AI infrastructure to a state-violence system as the same kind of corporate-complicity problem #NoTechForICE treats the supply of data-broker and case-management infrastructure to ICE, and proposes the same kind of intervention, namely tech-worker dissent paired with coalition pressure on the contracting companies. The downstream campaign's principal tactics — anonymous open letters, internal petitions, coordinated sit-ins, student pledges — were drawn from #NoTechForICE's documented organising shape rather than improvised. The two framings now sit as paired peers in the corpus's record of tech-worker conscience as a movement-organising posture.

Why it has carried

Three features have made #NoTechForICE durable as a framing.

First, it names the supply chain — federal-contracting, cloud infrastructure, commercial data brokers, biometric databases — rather than any single ICE policy or enforcement operation. By doing so it locates the corporate-complicity argument at the same scale as the contracts themselves, and refuses the standard rebuttal that the campaign's organising base lacks expertise on enforcement operational specifics. The campaign's argument has been legible across the changing administrations and enforcement priorities of the 2018–ongoing period precisely because the framing operates one level above the political-cycle salience of any particular enforcement push.

Second, it builds the campaign's strategic register on a multi-front model — students, workers, faith communities, civil-liberties organisations, and immigrant-rights coalitions — through which the framing can be carried by different organising bases without rewriting. The campaign's student-pledge programme and the academic-conference sponsorship campaigns supply a different pressure register than the worker-dissent track, and the two registers have remained mutually reinforcing rather than competing across the campaign's history.

Third, the framing has supplied the organising language for a documented downstream campaign — No Tech For Apartheid — and through that downstream travel has consolidated its position as the U.S. movement-side template for tech-worker dissent against corporate complicity in state violence. The lineage signal cuts both ways: it has expanded #NoTechForICE's analytical reach beyond the immigration-enforcement frame, and has supplied the downstream campaign with a documented organising shape that did not have to be improvised from scratch.

Structurally parallel to msg-no-tech-for-apartheid — the framing's direct downstream descendant whose lead coalition is also not yet in corpus — this framing's lead organising vehicle (Mijente, the campaign's organisational anchor) is not yet in corpus; the framing's in-corpus carriage runs through MediaJustice as Mijente's standing co-anchor of the Take Back Tech convening series and as the host venue through which the #NoTechForICE analytical premise has been delivered to the U.S. grassroots tech-justice field at scale.