Jacinta González

Jacinta González is the principal US Latinx-immigrant-justice voice on the tech-supply-chain into immigration enforcement, and the leading public face of the #NoTechForICE campaign across its decisive 2018-2024 arc. She is tracked here as a Voice because her sustained on-record output — bylined Truthout op-eds including To Defeat ICE, We Need to Target Its Backers — Microsoft and Amazon (1 May 2019) and "Better Than Trump" Isn't Good Enough. End Deportation Now. (25 June 2021), the bylined OpenGlobalRights essay When technology facilitates ICE raids that violate rights, who is responsible? (3 March 2020), named-source statements in Democracy Now!, NBC News, CNBC, the Electronic Frontier Foundation press channel, and Carolina Mendez's Mijente dispatch on the Take Back Tech 2024 Chicago plenary, podcast appearances on Team Human with Douglas Rushkoff, the Singularity 1on1 podcast, Convergence's Hegemonicon / Block & Build, and the Our Data Bodies Oral Histories of Surveillance series, and her co-anchoring of Mijente's 2020 Surveillance Pandemic convening with Naomi Klein and Edward Snowden — has done more than any other US Latinx organiser's to install into mainstream press, regulatory, philanthropic, and tech-worker discourse the framings under which the corpus's federal-contracting and AI-and-immigration-enforcement registers operate from the US vantage (see Person entry).

She is the corpus's first US Latinx-immigrant-justice Voice and the first US voice anchored on the tech-supplier / federal-contracting register of grassroots AI accountability, complementing the UK / European platform-labour register the corpus tracks through voice-james-farrar, the African content-moderation register through voice-daniel-motaung, and the US creative-industry register through voice-fran-drescher. She carries two distinct registers across one career arc: the corporate-backers / NoTechForICE register she installed across the 2018-2024 Mijente campaign arc against Palantir, Amazon, Microsoft, Salesforce, Thomson Reuters, and LexisNexis, and the AI-and-immigration-enforcement / Automating Deportation register she has carried at the Mijente / Just Futures Law DHS AI-inventory research front since 2024 and continues to anchor at MediaJustice.

Signature framings

Four framings in González's public output have travelled beyond her own platforms into mainstream press, philanthropic, and tech-worker discourse on US immigration enforcement and AI accountability.

• "Target the corporate backers" / supply-chain accountability. This is her single most-cited public-policy framing and the strategic core of the #NoTechForICE campaign. Her 1 May 2019 Truthout op-ed — To Defeat ICE, We Need to Target Its Backers — Microsoft and Amazon — gave the framing its sharpest published statement, naming the strategic premise that "ICE is creating a police state of wide-scale surveillance, and the technology providers that we use every day are helping it" and that "Amazon, Microsoft and Palantir ... are selling out customers by collecting their data and profiting off the targeting and harassment of our communities". The line she pairs with that statement — "when we work across sectors and move coordinated strategies against the infrastructure and technology that is enabling ICE's targeted attacks against our community, we expand the possibilities for organizing" — is the operational doctrine of the campus-and-tech-worker pressure model the campaign has run since 2018. The framing carried into NBC News, CNBC, and Bloomberg coverage of the November 2019 sixteen-university coordinated action wave against Palantir, and from there into the public-policy register on federal contracting with ICE.
• "Without tech like Palantir's, ICE would arrest far fewer" / technology as enforcement-multiplier. This is the campaign's theoretical premise made operational. In her 3 March 2020 OpenGlobalRights essay González gave the framing its most compact statement — "without tech like Palantir's, ICE agents would likely arrest, detain, prosecute, and deport far fewer people than they do today" — and named the operational mechanism: "Palantir's software is used by ICE agents to amass data on individuals who are thereby more easily arrested and separated from their families". The framing converts the question of corporate responsibility from a question of complicity into one of multiplicative causation, and undergirds the campaign's February 2021 HHS Protect FOIA lawsuit, in which González named the same accountability question against the COVID-era data infrastructure: "HHS has a history of sharing personal data with ICE for deportation purposes, to say nothing of the fact that the company that designed this platform, Palantir, is a well-known ICE contractor".
• "Better than Trump isn't good enough" / bipartisan-deportation critique. This is the framing González has used to convert the public conversation on immigration enforcement from an administrative-reform register into a structural one. Her 25 June 2021 Truthout op-ed gave the framing its most compact statement — "the Biden administration has a choice to make: continue to destroy immigrant families, or pursue humane and just immigration policies" — and named the underlying argument that "the policing and mass incarceration systems in this country are fundamentally rigged against Black and Latinx people — and our immigration enforcement system is an extension of that". The line keeps the campaign's analytical pressure on the bipartisan continuity of the deportation infrastructure and was a public-vocabulary contribution to the 2021 movement-side reception of the early Biden administration's ICE-reform announcements.
• "Automating Deportation" / AI in immigration enforcement. This is the framing González has carried since 2024 and now anchors at MediaJustice. The substantive research substrate is the Mijente / Just Futures Law Automating Deportation report (2024) — anchored on the Reining in AI Surveillance programme — which documents the LexisNexis Accurint tool that "provides more than 11,000 ICE agents access to analytics that automate decisions about vetting, screening, and targeting people for deportation" and the ICE predictive algorithm that "generates a weekly Hurricane Score to make decisions on someone's conditions of supervision". At the June 2024 Take Back Tech Chicago plenary, González gave the framing its public statement, naming that the mobile fingerprinting devices used by ICE in domestic raids "are the same as those used in Afghanistan and Iraq" and that this is "the same tech, repurposed for more exploitation". In the October 2024 Hegemonicon podcast with William Lawrence she carried the framing into a discussion of the data-broker register specifically, naming Thomson Reuters and LexisNexis as the brokers selling personal information to ICE for raids based on private data trails rather than direct policing.

Public output and venues

González's public-facing work spans five overlapping channels.

• Truthout bylined op-eds. Her Truthout author archive is the most concentrated venue of her bylined essayist register. The most-cited piece is To Defeat ICE, We Need to Target Its Backers — Microsoft and Amazon (1 May 2019), which installed the corporate-backers framing into the US progressive-press register; "Better Than Trump" Isn't Good Enough. End Deportation Now. (25 June 2021) carries the bipartisan-deportation critique; and How to Stop Child Separation? Stop Sending Their Parents to Prison. (17 June 2018) carries the family-separation register. The archive is the long-running US-progressive-press venue of her sole-authored essayist output.
• OpenGlobalRights and the international-human-rights register. Her bylined OpenGlobalRights essay When technology facilitates ICE raids that violate rights, who is responsible? (3 March 2020) is the principal long-form piece in which she carries the enforcement-multiplier argument into the international-human-rights register, invoking the UN High Commissioner for Human Rights framing of family separation as "arbitrary and unlawful interference in family life" and detention practices as potentially "cruel, inhumane, or degrading treatment prohibited by international law". The piece bridges the US progressive-press venue of her Truthout output and the global human-rights-and-corporate-accountability register.
• External press as named source. Across the multi-year #NoTechForICE arc González has been the regular US Latinx-immigrant-justice civil-society voice quoted in mainstream and specialist press: Democracy Now! (22 March 2016) carries the earliest national-press long-form interview, anchored on her Phoenix arrest and ICE transfer; NBC News (November 2019) and CNBC (December 2019) carried her "primary brokers" framing of Palantir during the sixteen-university campus action wave; the Electronic Frontier Foundation press channel carried her HHS Protect "very alarming" framing on the February 2021 FOIA lawsuit; and Carolina Mendez's Mijente dispatch (28 June 2024) carried her Take Back Tech 2024 plenary "same tech, repurposed for more exploitation" framing into the campaign's own dispatch register.
• Long-form podcast appearances. González's podcast output spans the activist-organising, tech-cultural-criticism, futurism-interview, and academic-community-research registers. Douglas Rushkoff's Team Human episode Amazon's Cloud Industrial Complex (15 March 2019) with Amy Herzog carries the corporate-backers argument into the tech-cultural-criticism listenership and named the "cloud industrial complex" framing; Nikola Danaylov's Singularity 1on1 podcast (6 August 2020) gave the framing a two-hour treatment in the speculative-tech and futurism-interview register, with her featured pull-quote that "organizing is the key to transforming the system"; the Our Data Bodies Oral Histories of Surveillance episode (15 December 2020) carries her sustained long-form first-person account into the academic-community-research register; and William Lawrence's Convergence Magazine Hegemonicon / Block & Build episode Protecting Our Migrant Neighbors with Jacinta González (22 October 2024) carries her data-broker and AI-and-immigration framings into the US left-strategy podcast register.
• Convening and plenary platforms. Her co-anchoring of Mijente's 2020 Surveillance Pandemic convening with Naomi Klein and Edward Snowden was 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. Her plenary anchoring of the June 2024 Take Back Tech Chicago convening — co-hosted with MediaJustice, with Ruha Benjamin of the Ida B. Wells Just Data Lab and Mizue Aizeki of the Surveillance Resistance Lab — and her speaker slot at the June 2024 Through the Portal Conference establish her sustained convening-platform register on the federal-contracting and AI-in-immigration questions.

Organisational vehicles

González's public output runs through two primary organisational vehicles and three earlier organising bases. Mijente, the US Latinx political home she co-founded in 2015 and inside which she carried successively the Field Director, Senior Campaign Organizer (leading #NoTechForICE), and Policy Director titles through to early 2025, is the principal organisational anchor of the 2015-2025 output: the #NoTechForICE campaign and its multi-year tech-supplier-pressure model, the October 2018 launch of Who's Behind ICE? The Tech and Data Companies Fueling Deportations, the 2020 Surveillance Pandemic convening, the February 2021 HHS Protect FOIA lawsuit, and the 2024 Mijente / Just Futures Law Automating Deportation DHS AI-inventory research line. MediaJustice, where she has been inaugural Head of Programs and Executive Team member since 17 March 2025 under Steven Renderos's direction, is her current organisational platform and the formalisation of a long-running Mijente–MediaJustice strategic partnership. The three earlier organising bases — the Congress of Day Laborers inside the New Orleans Workers' Center for Racial Justice (2007-2014), PODER in México on the Río Sonora River Basin committees, and the Instituto de Formación Política for grassroots political education — form the day-labour-organising, environmental-justice, and political-education registers on which her current surveillance-and-data-broker accountability work draws.

Why this is a Voice entry

A Voice entry is created here, rather than additional structure on the Person entry, because González's public output is itself the load-bearing object the corpus needs to track: the working civil-society framing of the tech-supply-chain into US immigration enforcement — "target the corporate backers", "without tech like Palantir's, ICE would arrest far fewer", "better than Trump isn't good enough", and "Automating Deportation" — is the language she installed into US progressive-press, mainstream-press, international-human-rights, and US-left-strategy discourse across the 2018-2025 Mijente campaign arc and is now carrying into the MediaJustice convening platform. The corpus's Mijente cluster and the #NoTechForICE message carry no other Voice anchor, and the corpus's broader anti-deportation and federal-contracting registers — which the corpus tracks through the message and event entries above — have carried no US Latinx Voice on the supply-chain register until now. Affiliation and biographical structure are recorded on the linked Person entry per the corpus's Person/Voice split.