Big banks back away from Trump's immigration policies, but tech giants are still on board

Activist pressure is succeeding against big banks that invest in the private prison industry, including the detention centers the Trump administration relies on to implement its cruel immigration policies. But there’s another major industry making deportation and family separation possible that’s resisting the pressure: The tech industry is not backing off of its contracts with the government for things like data mining and facial recognition software.

JPMorgan Chase, Wells Fargo, and U.S. Bank have all said they’re moving away from private prison industry investments, following pressure from activists that highlights a real danger to the financial institutions’ reputations and other business opportunities. “They want to build a customer base by opening more branches,” legendary organizer Stephen Lerner told the Washington Post. “Investing in private prisons doesn’t help them in immigrant communities. The mood of the country is that the vast majority of people don’t support having families interned or having children separated from their families.”

The tech industry is another story. Palantir, which was co-founded by ardent Trump supporter Peter Thiel, works with ICE to identify immigrants for deportation through data mining. Activists have called on Amazon to stop hosting Palantir on its servers and to stop selling its facial recognition technology to government groups. Palantir can reliably be expected to be evil, but Amazon, too, has refused to stop allowing its products to be used to support the Trump administration’s agenda. So has Microsoft, which responded to its own workers’ pleas for it to end a contract with ICE by insisting that the contract was irrelevant to family separation because it was just for things like email, calendars, and document management. Okay, guys, but go ahead, make ICE do its work without reliable email and see if that gets in its way a little!

Tech businesses with effectively pro-ICE positions face recruiting difficulties and pressure from their own workers—but so far that hasn’t been enough. Activists’ success at getting the big banks to back away from private prisons, though, should give the tech industry some reason to look at its cost-benefit analysis again.

from Daily Kos https://ift.tt/2EUAxlZ