Google’s rank-and-file are joining together to address their bosses with a collective demand: cut ties with the US government’s immigration agencies.
As reported by CNBC, over 1,000 “Googlers” have signed onto an open letter demanding a divestment from partnerships with United States Immigration & Customs Enforcement (ICE) and Customs & Border Protection (CBP).
“In cities across the country we have witnessed these agencies conducting paramilitary-style raids, kidnapping hundreds of civilians, and murdering protestors and legal observers,” the letter reads.
The letter lists a number of Google products and systems being used to power what it calls a “campaign of surveillance, violence, and repression.” Among them are Cloud, which forms the backbone of CBP’s national surveillance network, the Google Play Store, which is blocking ICE tracking apps, and YouTube, which runs ICE ads encouraging immigrants to “self-deport.”
“As the workers who provide the foundational labor in building this technology, we are horrified,” the letter reads. “We are vehemently opposed to Google’s partnerships with DHS, CBP, and ICE. We consider it our leadership’s ethical and policy-bound responsibility to disclose all contracts and collaboration with CBP and ICE, and to divest from these partnerships.”
There are four demands in total: for Google leadership to publicly acknowledge the danger federal agents pose to all US workers, respond to employee questions about nebulous contracts with government agencies, establish worker safety measures across all Google campuses, and establish “red lines” around what contracts are allowed in the future.
While 1,000 workers is a drop in the bucket compared to Google’s global workforce of around 183,000, an organized group of dissenting workers could cause massive disruptions to the company’s operations. It highlights the major rift between Google’s financial interests and its stated values — exposing how the drive to extract profit from government contracts has trumped the company’s once-vaunted ethical principles, not to mention those of its rank-and-file.
There’s also a practical concern. Google is a colossal company that makes most of its money from advertising, so cutting loose a few government agencies wouldn’t impact its bottom line much. Instead, the cost would likely be political: if Google severed its relationship with ICE and CBP on ethical grounds, it would almost certainly become a target for punitive federal action — antitrust crackdowns, regulatory harassment, loss of exclusive contracts — in a conflict that would divide its userbase and sever its symbiotic relationship with the state.
ICE contracting isn’t the first time that Google workers have balked at the company’s military contracts. In 2024, 200 of the workers developing Google’s DeepMind signed a letter calling on the company to drop its contracts with military organizations and citing the company’s work with the Israeli military on surveillance and target selection.
And back in 2018, more than 3,100 workers at Google penned yet another open letter to protest Project Maven, a Pentagon program using AI to analyze video imagery for more efficient drone strikes.
“We believe that Google should not be in the business of war,” they wrote at the time, adding that in the face of “growing fears of biased and weaponized AI, Google is already struggling to keep the public’s trust.”
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