French tech and consulting multinational Capgemini said it is “immediately” selling its U.S. unit that works with Immigration and Customs Enforcement, after the French finance minister and lawmakers expressed pointed concerns over a contract with the agency to surveil and locate undocumented immigrants.
Capgemini said in a statement Sunday that the Paris-based parent company is making the divestiture because it is unable to “exercise appropriate control” over the U.S. subsidiary to “ensure alignment with the Group’s objectives.”
At issue is the participation of Capgemini’s U.S. subsidiary, Capgemini Government Solutions, in a new ICE program to track 1.5 million undocumented immigrants through paid contractors using a combination of remote technologies and on-the-ground surveillance, with financial incentives for speed in locating individuals. CGS was set to be the lead contractor for the “skip-tracing” program, having secured a contract with a ceiling of $365 million over two years — the highest among 14 chosen contractors.
French Finance Minister Roland Lescure told lawmakers last week that he was urging Capgemini to explain the contract with “complete transparency” and to question its nature. Capgemini said two days later that the contract was not currently being executed.
It has been rare for companies working with ICE to criticize the Trump administration’s deportation surge. But in the wake of two killings of American protesters in Minneapolis, several international companies have said they were rethinking their business relationships in recent days.
The Jim Pattison Group, a Canadian real estate company, said Friday that a transaction to sell an industrial building in Ashland, Virginia, to ICE “will not be proceeding,” following backlash from Canadian politicians, including calls from the British Columbia Green Party for a boycott of the firm.
The province’s attorney general, Niki Sharma, said at a news conference Tuesday that “we watch in horror” the events in Minneapolis, according to Global News. She called on Canadian business executives “to think about their role in what is unfolding there.”
Hundreds of protesters congregated Friday outside the Vancouver headquarters of a second Canadian company, the social media management firm Hootsuite, which has a contract with ICE’s public affairs office. “We said Canadians won’t tolerate far-right authoritarianism and anyone who supports it,” Democracy Rising, the group that organized the protest, said in a Threads post.
Hootsuite CEO Irina Novoselsky issued a public letter earlier last week calling ICE’s recent activities “wrong” and the loss of life “devastating” but defended the continuation of the contract, saying Hootsuite is providing social media support rather than tracking or surveillance tools to ICE.
“We work with a wide range of organizations because listening to real conversations leads to insights that drive better decisions and accountability, without endorsing specific actions or policies,” she wrote.
ICE, Capgemini, the Jim Pattison Group and Hootsuite did not immediately respond Monday to requests for comment.
Capgemini CEO Aiman Ezzat said in a LinkedIn post on Jan. 25 that the independent directors of its CGS subsidiary were reviewing the skip-tracing contract and that the French parent company had only recently learned of some details of the ICE program because of fire walls around the unit to protect classified work for the U.S. government.
“The nature and scope of this work has raised questions compared to what we typically do as a business and technology firm,” Ezzat wrote.
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