Mijente

Mijente is the U.S. national Latinx and Chicanx digital-and-grassroots organising hub, founded in Phoenix, Arizona in December 2015 as a "new kind of political home" for Latinx people independent of the establishment Democratic Party and corporate interests. The organisation describes itself, in its own framing, as a "digital hub and home for the Latinx community" fighting for "economic, racial, gender, and climate justice" on behalf of the "over 60 million" Latinx people in the United States, and operates as a three-entity family — the Mijente 501(c)(4) advocacy and organising hub, the Mijente Support Committee 501(c)(3) charitable sister incorporated in 2017, and a separately constituted Mijente Political Action Committee. Mijente's place in the make-AI-good corpus is as the originating and convening home of the #NoTechForICE framing — the U.S. grassroots campaign demanding that Silicon Valley contractors end the federal contracts under which they supply data-broker, case-management, cloud, and surveillance infrastructure to U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) and Customs and Border Protection (CBP) — and as the principal Latinx-led anchor for the surveillance-tech-and-immigration-enforcement node of U.S. grassroots tech accountability.

Founding and political-home framing

Mijente's founding act was the Lánzate convening of 12–13 December 2015, at which approximately 200 Latinx movement leaders gathered to explore a self-described "new kind of political home" — explicitly distinct from the Democratic Party machinery and corporate-funded Latinx civic infrastructure. The organisation's own founding blog post frames the project as a recognition that "movements in this country have come alive because so many people simply can't wait anymore" and that organising spaces function for diasporic communities as "a form of sanctuary", with the goal of advancing El Buenvivir — "a world where our gente have what they need to live well, together", encompassing environmental protection, healthcare, housing, rest, and self-determination. The name's intentional spelling — the J in Mijente rather than the conventional G — is deliberate: it "stands for Justice" alongside jotería, jugoso, juntes, and joy, and signals the organisation's posture of treating language and culture as "living, breathing, and imperfect" rather than gatekept.

The organisation's immediate organisational precursor was the #Not1MoreDeportation campaign — the anti-deportation effort that Mijente co-founder Marisa Franco had led as Campaign Director at the National Day Laborer Organizing Network (NDLON), and which the National Organizing Institute named Campaign of the Year in 2014. Franco continues to serve as co-founder and Executive Director of both Mijente and the Mijente Support Committee; Issa Noloya is the organisation's deputy director, with a staff of 23 across the family entities as of the most recent filing.

Organisational structure and finance

Mijente operates through three coordinated legal entities to span the boundary between charitable, advocacy, and electoral work that U.S. nonprofit law draws — a common pattern for organisations that combine community organising, c4-permissible legislative advocacy, and PAC-vehicle electoral endorsements. The 501(c)(4) Mijente carries the advocacy and organising programmes, including #NoTechForICE; the 501(c)(3) Mijente Support Committee, incorporated in 2017 with EIN 82-1711382 and registered at the shared Phoenix, Arizona address at 734 W Polk St, holds the charitable-side programmatic work and accepts tax-deductible support; and Mijente PAC is the political-action-committee vehicle through which the family makes formal candidate endorsements. The Support Committee reports assets above $10 million and annual income above $1 million in its IRS filings; the c4-side Mijente reports 2024 revenue of approximately $2.6 million, expenses of approximately $3.1 million, and net assets near $4 million per its most recent public filing as compiled by InfluenceWatch. Major institutional funders include the Ford Foundation ($300,000 to the Support Committee in 2022) and the Tides Foundation ($600,000 to the Support Committee in 2022), with the c4-side Mijente reporting substantial recurring support from the Open Society Action Fund ($1.55 million in 2022, $500,000 in 2024), Tides Advocacy, the Levi Strauss Foundation, the Groundswell Action Fund, and the Foundation for a Just Society. Membership in the organisation is restricted to people of Hispanic or Chicano ancestry in the U.S. and Puerto Rico, with non-Latinx individuals able to make one-time donations; this membership-eligibility rule is part of how Mijente operationalises its self-description as a Latinx-led political home rather than a generalist civil-society organisation.

#NoTechForICE and the Who's Behind ICE? report

Mijente's principal contribution to the make-AI-good corpus is the #NoTechForICE campaign and its founding research artefact, the October 2018 report Who's Behind ICE? The Tech and Data Companies Fueling Deportations. The report — commissioned jointly by Mijente, the National Immigration Project, and the Immigrant Defense Project, and researched by Empower LLC — 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 #NoTechForICE campaign was operationalised alongside the report as Mijente's public-facing organising vehicle, articulated through five named goals: exposing tech's outsized role in law enforcement; educating communities; taking direct action; organising with tech workers and students; and targeting specific named contractors — Palantir, Amazon Web Services, Northrop Grumman, Microsoft, and Salesforce.

The campaign's principal corporate target has been Palantir — the Peter-Thiel-co-founded data-analytics firm whose Investigative Case Management (ICM) system is described in U.S. government procurement documents as "mission critical" to ICE's investigations infrastructure, and was used at the U.S. southern border to investigate the families and sponsors of unaccompanied children, resulting in the arrests of at least 443 people in a 90-day operation. The campaign's student-organising leg disrupted Palantir's tech-talent recruitment pipeline through a coordinated wave of campus actions at sixteen U.S. and U.K. universities in November 2019 — Stanford, UC Berkeley, Georgia Tech, Yale, Oxford, Cambridge, the University of Chicago, and others — with students kicking Palantir recruiters out of career fairs, protesting company speakers, and pressuring administrators to drop institutional sponsorship. The campaign's strategic-pressure model rests on the named contracting companies' dependence on top-university recruitment: Mijente's working theory is that the campus career-fair venue is the contracting companies' principal vulnerability, since their growth depends on a steady pipeline of computer-science graduates whose own moral positions on ICE contracting are contestable. The campaign's tech-worker leg has organised the internal-dissent register inside the same companies — anonymous-worker letters, internal petitions, and public-resignation-driven exits — and its faith-and-civil-liberties leg has carried the broader coalition pressure outside the firms themselves.

Take Back Tech, MediaJustice, and the convening series

Mijente's principal in-corpus convening partner is MediaJustice, with which it co-anchors the Take Back Tech convening series — the standing U.S. grassroots people's-summit on AI, surveillance, and carceral technology. The inaugural Take Back Tech of 26–28 July 2019 in San Jose was co-organised by Mijente, 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" focused on tech companies' role in profiting from criminal-justice and immigration-enforcement systems. The 2024 Chicago edition, co-hosted with MediaJustice, drew 450 participants from 136 U.S. cities and 4 countries into 40 workshops across six focus areas — surveillance and state violence against marginalised communities, AI bias and discriminatory applications, reproductive freedom in the age of surveillance, border technology and immigration enforcement automation, carceral tech and police surveillance, and tech-worker organising — with named partner participation from the Stop LAPD Spying Coalition, the Carceral Tech Resistance Network, Accountable Tech, the Advancement Project, Just Futures Law, and the Athena Coalition. The 2026 Atlanta edition extended the programme's geographic and sectoral reach. Take Back Tech functions in Mijente's portfolio as both the public-facing convening of #NoTechForICE's coalition register and the bridge through which the framing's downstream lineage — into the 2021 #NoTechForApartheid campaign that explicitly modelled its name on #NoTechForICE — is maintained as a shared organising practice across Latinx, Black-led, and tech-worker movement infrastructure.

Electoral work and the wider organising portfolio

Beyond the surveillance-tech-and-immigration-enforcement line, Mijente carries an electoral-organising programme that is central to the organisation's self-description. The organisation cites two principal electoral wins: the 2016 defeat of Maricopa County sheriff Joe Arpaio — the central enforcement figure of Arizona's SB1070 racial-profiling regime — and the 2020 mobilisation of record numbers of Latinx voters in Georgia and other battleground states toward the Biden–Harris ticket. The organisation has endorsed Democratic candidates including Stacey Abrams in 2018 and Bernie Sanders in 2020. Alongside the electoral work, Mijente runs the standing Eyes on ICE: Truth & Accountability programme demanding federal-administration action to halt deportations and end immigration detention, and continues the lineage of #Not1MoreDeportation through state-level and city-level local organising in Arizona, Georgia, New York, California, and other geographies where the organisation has membership clusters. The c4-and-c3 division of labour is what enables the organisation to combine these registers within a single institutional family: c3-side programmatic education, c4-side legislative advocacy, and PAC-side candidate endorsements running as a coordinated whole.

Posture in the corpus

Mijente sits in the make-AI-good corpus as the leading U.S. Latinx-led grassroots anchor for the surveillance-tech-accountability movement area — the organisational home from which the #NoTechForICE framing was launched, the institutional convening partner of the Take Back Tech series Mijente co-anchors with MediaJustice, and a foundational node of the U.S. anti-Palantir, anti-Amazon-Web-Services, anti-Microsoft, anti-Salesforce, and anti-Northrop-Grumman federal-contracting accountability coalition. The organisation's strategic premise — that contesting the deployment of automated decision-making systems against immigrant communities requires combining federal-procurement transparency research, tech-worker-and-student pressure on the named corporate contractors, electoral organising against the state actors who buy the systems, and grassroots Latinx political-home infrastructure capable of holding all three together — is the canonical Latinx-led template for engaging non-AI publics in shaping how the U.S. state and U.S. corporations build and deploy surveillance and immigration-enforcement technology. Mijente's continuing centrality in this line of work, and its position as the U.S. corpus's first Latinx-led national organisation in the surveillance-and-immigration-tech-accountability sub-type, fill a coverage gap that the corpus had previously held only through the message and campaign entries that named Mijente without an organisational anchor of its own.