A new report details how some of the world’s biggest tech and data companies—including Amazon, Palantir, Microsoft, and Salesforce—are raking in millions by “playing an increasingly central role in facilitating the expansion and acceleration of arrests, detentions, and deportations” in the Trump era.
Who’s Behind ICE? (pdf)—produced by the research firm Empower LLC at the request of Mijente, the National Immigration Project, and the Immigrant Defense Project—outlines how lobbying by major tech firms leads to massive government contracts for services that help the Trump administration impose its anti-immigrant agenda.
The Department of Homeland Security (DHS)—which oversees Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) as well as Customs and Border Protection (CBP)—spends about 10 percent of its $44 billion annual budget on data management.
Relying on taxpayer dollars to cover the costs of contracts with tech companies, “ICE is preparing to use tech for mass deportation at an unprecedented scale that could make ‘Sanctuary’ city- and state-level protections obsolete,” according to the report. Two companies “are at the forefront of these developments, providing the collection, storage, and management of the vast amount of information required by ICE to increase its reach.”
Those companies are Amazon—run by Jeff Bezos, the richest man on Earth—and CIA-funded Palantir, which was co-founded by billionaire and GOP donor Peter Thiel, a vocal defender of President Donald Trump.
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