Employee petition latest in tech employees’ rebellion over software tools used by US immigration authorities following violence
Google is facing a fresh wave of employee dissent as more than 1,000 workers are calling on the company to cut business ties with US immigration authorities, arguing that its technology is helping to enable violence and repression in the country.
In an open letter published on the campaign site Googlers Demand: Worker Safety & ICE Contract Transparency, Google employees say they are “appalled by the violence” inflicted by US Immigration & Customs Enforcement (ICE) and Customs & Border Protection (CBP), and “horrified” by the company’s role in it. They accuse the company of “powering this campaign of surveillance, violence, and repression” through cloud and artificial intelligence services used by US federal agencies.
More than 1,100 Google employees have signed the petition since it was published on Feb. 6 — one of the largest anti-ICE protests by employees of a company since a series of fatal shootings linked to federal immigration operations in Minneapolis, according to Wired.
The petition alleges that Google Cloud helps stitch together CBP surveillance systems along the border, supports Palantir’s ImmigrationOS platform, and that generative AI tools are being deployed by the US Department of Homeland Security (DHS) and CBP for “workforce enablement” and “improving operational efficiency.” It also points to Google products such as the Play Store and YouTube, noting that key ICE‑tracking apps have been blocked while recruitment and “self‑deport” ads have run on the video platform.
Employees opposed to company’s current direction
The letter is explicit that the issue is not abstract ethics but day‑to‑day safety and values for people who work at Google. “We are vehemently opposed to Google’s partnerships with DHS, CBP, and ICE,” the workers write, calling it leadership’s “ethical and policy‑bound responsibility” to disclose all contracts with immigration agencies and divest from those relationships.
It also frames the campaign as a matter of moral consistency for the company, citing a January social media post by Google chief scientist Jeff Dean, who wrote: “We all bear a collective responsibility to speak up and not be silent when we see things like the events of the last week.”
While Google has said in earlier statements to media that some of its work with DHS involves basic cloud infrastructure available to many customers, the company has not publicly addressed the latest petition in detail, according to CNBC.
Demands centred on worker safety and transparency
The petition outlines four concrete demands of Google’s leadership. First, executives are asked to acknowledge the danger and violence faced by workers in US cities where ICE and CBP are active, and to publicly call for urgent government responses. The letter compares current conditions to the early COVID‑19 period and calls for “proportional community responses like school shutdowns and mutual aid networks.”
Second, employees want an emergency, live, and recorded internal town hall focused specifically on contracts with DHS, CBP and the military, without AI‑generated summaries or question‑filtering.
Third, the letter calls for expanded protections for all categories of workers, including flexible work‑from‑home options as well as legal and immigration support.
Finally, signatories want full disclosure of the company’s ties with immigration and border agencies and clear “red lines” for how Google’s cloud and AI technologies may be used in any state security context.
Workers angered over perceived breach of values
One Google worker told the BBC that he found it “abhorrent” to go to work. “I was proud to be working at a company with a moral compass. I’m not proud anymore,” he said.
“This is not the company I signed up to work for — I would have never interviewed to work for a military contractor,” another Google employee told the BBC.
While the controversy is centred on US immigration enforcement, the issues raised are relevant north of the border. Canadian-based staff at multinationals such as Google — the company employs a few thousand people in Montreal, Ottawa, Toronto, Vancouver, and Kitchener-Waterloo, Ont., and the petition appears to be open to all Google employees — may be contributing work to systems deployed in other jurisdictions, sometimes without full visibility into end uses.
The letter and petition follows one published in January and signed by hundreds of worker at tech companies such as Amazon, Microsoft, and Meta, demanding those companies to stop supporting the crackdown by ICE and CBP, the BBC reported. The developers of the Google petition also state on the petition site that they’re affiliated with an organized group of Amazon and Google workers challenging those companies’ contracts with the Israeli government and military.
