President Trump ran on a sweeping promise of mass deportations, and in the first months of his presidency, he has set about expanding the infrastructure for this project. This expansion has been both physical (expanding detention capacity across the United States, Guantánamo Bay, and even El Salvador) and digital (gaining access to government troves of personal data and leveraging contracts with private firms to support mass roundups).

Those of us long involved in the fight for the dignity and flourishing of undocumented and immigrant communities always knew that this administration’s cruelty would not stop with them. Indeed, in the last few weeks, US Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) has begun arresting and detaining US permanent residents and residents with valid work visas. In the face of public outrage, President Trump has vowed that he’s just getting started.

This time around, the nation’s tech companies are proudly furnishing the administration with the tools to fulfill its ambition.

We are at a crossroads as a nation. One side believes that immigrant communities are at the essence of this country, and that civil rights are too. We have the Constitution behind us, as well as the support of the families and workers that make this country run. The other side, now led by the Trump administration, is desperate to criminalize, surveil, detain, and deport as many immigrants as possible, without regard for civil liberties or the courts that enforce them. Even as President Trump guts and defunds other government functions, his administration has poured more money and resources into deportation infrastructure, including an expansion of tech contracts. His threats against immigrants—and all of us—are not empty ones.

We’re disgusted but not surprised, because these methods are not new. During the first Trump administration, our Latinx community organization Mijente built the #NoTechForICE campaign to respond to the government’s escalating partnerships with data and technology companies. #NoTechForICE published reports on how much corporations like Amazon, LexisNexis, and Palantir made selling the software, services, and data that enabled ICE to terrorize our immigrant communities. We exposed the means and methods used to track people down with biometric and geolocating technologies. We showed up to demonstrate at 20 campus job fairs and organized huge, sustained protests at Palantir’s former headquarters in Palo Alto.

We did all this all because we believed that pressuring these firms’ economic interests—in Palantir’s case, targeting its recruiting pipeline as the company sought to expand—was an available and effective means of throwing sand in the gears of institutional cruelty. We still believe that. And we had some wins. We believe our work is part of what pushed Palantir to move its headquarters out of the Bay Area, and, at least for a time, we made it difficult for Palantir to recruit college graduates, many of whom didn’t want to work for a company building the infrastructure for mass deportations, suffering, and harm.

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April 2025 Issue

Now, the alliances between these companies, their investors, and the federal government have expanded further. Shame is apparently considered obsolete in Silicon Valley. At January’s inauguration, and in the news ever since, the executives running tech companies like Google, Tesla, and Amazon have stood with Trump—and in the case of Elon Musk, even stood in for him. These men have attained the full stature of oligarchs. Their companies are ready to catch windfalls from the horrific and sometimes illegal actions of Trump’s new administration. We are seeing tech oligarchs move beyond the deportation of immigrants to offer their services in ushering in a politics of cruelty and venality that reaches into everyone’s life.

Google recently removed a promise in its AI Principles not to design or deploy ”technologies that cause or are likely to cause overall harm.” A former Amazon executive known for trampling labor rights is now Trump’s pick to oversee worker safety across the country. Whole Foods, owned by Amazon, is celebrating and accelerating the administration’s dismantling of the National Labor Relations Board. Palantir gets half its revenue from government contracts and has recently won new contracts with federal agencies. SpaceX and Starlink are indispensable to US surveillance at home and abroad. Data Brokers give ICE a way around sanctuary protections and the Fourth Amendment, selling sensitive personal information without a warrant. LexisNexis continues to work with ICE to create national target lists for its raids against immigrants.

Denouncing the Trump Administration’s fascism is not enough. The corporations and oligarchs standing behind it need to be put on notice. We are thrilled to see protests that call for corporate accountability, including at Tesla factories, showrooms, and dealerships, by federal workers and ordinary people. And we’re buoyed by the TeslaTakedown movement’s efforts to urge Tesla owners to sell their cars and dump their stock.

We know that whatever is perpetrated against the most vulnerable will eventually come for those who seem less so. All of our privacy and freedom is on the line until we stop them.

At Mijente, we will continue to shine a light on how deadly and invasive technologies are being deployed against undocumented people and migrants. In the past, we’ve resisted the machinery of deportation, exposed surveillance contracts, and united people to address the harms of Big Tech’s unchecked power. We won’t stop now. We’re organizing locally and nationally to end data broker contracts with ICE, close information sharing loopholes between ICE and local governments, and track how ICE is deploying AI to power its deportation machine. We are calling on local governments to commit to robust sanctuary protections without loopholes and to take it a step further, strengthening protections for immigrants and all residents in the face of a hostile oligarchy.

These fights weren’t easy during the last Trump administration—or during the Biden administration, for that matter. The road ahead certainly won’t be either. But we refuse to let the tech industry take over our country and divide our people. At Mijente and in our communities, we’ve never backed down, and we’re not starting now.