More than 700 Google workers have joined and confronted the company through an open letter demanding that they not negotiate a contract with the US Customs and Border Protection (CBP). due to “human rights abuses” that denounce that they are being committed on the southern border of the United States against immigrants.
In the petition, published on the medium platform, employees demand that the US company not sign a cloud computing contract with the CBP. The petition has been signed by more than 700 Google workers and 58 other people outside the company.
The CBP has recently submitted a contract for its cloud computing system to choose the company that will manage these infrastructures of the organization. Although it has not been announced if Google will participate in the selection process, employees have already shown themselves totally against doing business with this entity and declare that they will not work with it.
The signatories have described the actions carried out by the CBD at the border as “illegal” at the international and “immoral” human rights level and accused them of “perpetrating a system of malignant abuse and neglect.”
In the letter they explicitly demand that “Google publicly commits not to support the CBP, ICE (the Immigration and Customs Control Service) or the ORR (Office of Refugee Resettlement) with any infrastructure, financing or engineering resources, directly or indirectly, until they stop participating in human rights abuses. “
Some of the actions denounced by employees in the brief are: housing migrant minors, caging and damaging asylum seekers, separating minors from their parents and illegally detaining refugees and US citizens and the “negligence” that in recent months has led to the death of seven children in “detention camps”.
Employees have underlined how inconsistent it would be to collaborate with this organization due to the principles and values that Google executives have previously transmitted in their blogs, especially after the company’s refusal in June 2018 to develop Artificial Intelligence for military uses.
For example, Google then pledged not to develop technology for those “whose purpose contravenes the widely accepted principles of international law and human rights” or who wants to create a “diverse”, “inclusive” and “psychologically safe” place for all its workers.
