Google Workers Demand End to Cloud Services for Immigration Agencies

After federal immigration agents killed Alex Pretti in Minneapolis, Google employees lit up the company’s internal message boards with calls for the company to respond.

On Friday, more than 800 employees called on management in a petition to be transparent about how Google’s technology supports federal immigration agencies and urged the company to stop doing business with those organizations. The petition said they were “appalled by the violence” and “paramilitary-style raids” by immigration agents, which they accused Google of aiding.

They also asked the company to take safety measures to protect employees after a reported attempt by Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents to enter the company’s campus in Cambridge, Mass.

The petition signaled a revival of employee activism at Google and across Silicon Valley after years of relative calm. Tech workers, who have largely stayed quiet as executives cozied up to the Trump administration, are beginning to push some of the world’s biggest companies to pressure the White House to change its policies.

While signed by a fraction of the company’s roughly 190,000 workers, the new petition echoes turmoil at Google in 2018, after workers walked out over the company’s handling of sexual harassment and then protested its involvement in a Pentagon program that used artificial intelligence to improve drone strikes.

In the years since, Google’s management limited employees’ access to internal documents, scaled back all-hands meetings and cracked down on dissent. It fired 28 workers two years ago for protesting its cloud computing contract with the Israeli government.

As a result, some employees have become more hesitant to challenge management, said Matthew Tschiegg, an engineer on the cloud computing team who signed the petition. But many employees still believe in the company’s informal corporate motto: “Don’t be evil.”

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“They’ve scratched or scrubbed that motto, but the ethos lives deep,” said Mr. Tschiegg, who has worked at Google for more than a decade.

Google declined to comment.

Since President Trump returned to the White House, Silicon Valley executives and investors — including Elon Musk, who leads SpaceX and Tesla; Tim Cook, chief executive of Apple; and Mark Zuckerberg, chief executive of Meta — have lined up to support the president with donations and policy commitments. Their solidarity created the perception that the tech industry had shifted from liberal to conservative.

But Mr. Pretti’s death helped show some cracks. After that shooting, Mr. Cook, Sam Altman of OpenAI and others called on the president to draw down agents.

Sundar Pichai, Google’s chief executive, hasn’t issued a public statement. Jeff Dean, the chief scientist at Google’s DeepMind A.I. research lab, wrote in a social media post, “Every person regardless of political affiliation should be denouncing this.”

Google’s immigration petition, which received more than 500 signatures in 24 hours, was organized by No Tech for Apartheid, a group of Google and Amazon workers who advocate for the elimination of the companies’ joint cloud computing contract with the Israeli military and government.

The petition links to a media report by The Intercept that says Google is providing cloud services to Customs and Board Protection. It also points to Google’s partnership with Palantir, the data analysis and technology firm that developed software to track immigrants.

Mr. Tschiegg said employees didn’t know how Google’s technology was being used in those deals and others. The petition asks for a question-and-answer session with management about Google’s contracts with immigration authorities and clarity about whether the company will allow A.I. to be used by the government.

“It seems like they’re chasing the money,” he said. “It creates a moral and ethical dilemma.”

Tripp Mickle reports on some of the world’s biggest tech companies, including Nvidia, Google and Apple. He also writes about trends across the tech industry like layoffs and artificial intelligence.

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