Jacinta González

U.S. Latinx and Chicana organiser and the leading public face of the #NoTechForICE campaign — the Mijente co-founder and longtime senior strategist who led the campaign through its decisive 2018–2024 arc before joining MediaJustice as the organisation's inaugural Head of Programs on 17 March 2025. Across the 2015–2025 Mijente period she carried, at different points, the titles of Field Director, Senior Campaign Organizer, and Policy Director — the operational continuity of #NoTechForICE through three leadership re-organisations of the Mijente family of entities.

González began organising as a day labour organiser in post-Katrina New Orleans, where from 2007 to 2014 she co-founded and led the Congress of Day Laborers inside the New Orleans Workers' Center for Racial Justice — a base of undocumented reconstruction workers and families organising for worker power, racial justice, and resistance to deportations. The same UIC profile records her earlier organising at PODER in México on the Río Sonora River Basin committees against mining-industry water contamination, the environmental-justice register on which her later surveillance-and-data-broker accountability work draws. She was a 2007 New Voices Fellow and a 2012 Soros Justice Fellow, and a 2021 Galaxy Gives Fellow while based at the Phoenix, Arizona Mijente office.

González entered the U.S. national-organising register through a moment of forensic political visibility. On 19 March 2016, she was arrested at a highway blockade outside a Donald Trump campaign rally near Phoenix — locking her neck to the window of a van as part of the Mijente-led roadblock — and was held overnight before being transferred to U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) custody despite her U.S. citizenship. The transfer, which became a national press episode, she narrated for Democracy Now! as a worked example of the surveillance-and-profiling infrastructure her later campaign would set out to dismantle: "Because of my surname, I was singled out for interviews. I defended my constitutional rights, and I was retaliated against. Racial profiling is alive and well in Arizona." Mijente, then less than four months old, identified her at the time as its Field Director.

The substantive line of work that has defined her public role is the #NoTechForICE campaign. From the October 2018 launch of Who's Behind ICE? The Tech and Data Companies Fueling Deportations — the Mijente / National Immigration Project / Immigrant Defense Project investigation researched by Empower LLC that mapped the federal-contracting and data-broker supply chain into U.S. immigration enforcement — González has carried the public-facing organising lead. The campaign's strategic premise is that the named contractors — Palantir, Amazon Web Services, Microsoft, Salesforce, and Northrop Grumman — depend on top-university recruitment pipelines for their growth, and that the campus career-fair is therefore the contracting companies' principal vulnerability. González and her Mijente-led student-and-tech-worker organising base have disrupted Palantir's ability to recruit on college campuses across the U.S. through the November 2019 sixteen-university coordinated action wave and the multi-year campus-organising cadence that followed it. In 2020 she co-anchored Mijente's Surveillance Pandemic convening with Naomi Klein and Edward Snowden — the public moment at which the campaign's analytical frame extended from immigration enforcement specifically to the surveillance-and-criminalisation use of biometric, geolocation, and contact-tracing data more broadly.

By the Sunday-closing plenary of the June 2024 Take Back Tech Chicago convening co-hosted with MediaJustice — Resisting Borders and Technologies of Violence — Imagination towards Liberation — González was identified by MediaJustice as Mijente's Policy Director, and her contribution to the plenary alongside Ruha Benjamin of the Ida B. Wells Just Data Lab and Mizue Aizeki of the Surveillance Resistance Lab established the public framing that closed the convening: that border, carceral, and workplace surveillance technologies are not separable policy domains but a single infrastructure to be opposed across communities. Nine months later, on 17 March 2025, MediaJustice announced her appointment as its inaugural Head of Programs. The announcement framed the move as the formalisation of a long-running Mijente–MediaJustice strategic partnership — Executive Director Steven Renderos called her "a brilliant, experienced, and well-respected organizer whose dedication to community building is paralleled by her persistent interest in the way technology and media shape our lives" — and González herself characterised the transition as a response to an "increasingly hostile political terrain" in which "organizing across movements, asserting a clear vision for what we're fighting for, and educating our communities on reclaiming media and technology are the interventions we need most."

Outside her institutional roles, González is the founder of the Instituto de Formación Política — the grassroots political-education project through which the organising methodology she developed in New Orleans, México, and Phoenix is taught to the next generation of Latinx and immigrant-rights organisers. Her current public role keeps the through-line between the #NoTechForICE-era Latinx surveillance-tech-accountability framing and MediaJustice's broader U.S. tech-justice convening register; her position in the make-AI-good corpus is as the principal U.S. Latinx organiser publicly identified with the federal-contracting and tech-worker-pressure register of grassroots AI accountability.