Campaign Action
During the height of public outrage over the Trump administration’s barbaric “zero tolerance” policy, advocates called out Salesforce CEO Marc Benioff over the tech giant’s contract with Customs and Border Protection (CBP), the federal agency carrying out the kidnappings of migrant children at the border. For a moment, Benioff appeared to be listening, scheduling a call with a leading immigrant rights organization. But, his vacation plans apparently got in the way.
“’I am sorry I’m actually scuba diving right now,’ Benioff wrote to Jonathan Ryan, the executive director of the Refugee and Immigrant Center for Education and Legal Services (Raices) on 23 July, the day of their scheduled call,” the Guardian reports. Ryan was flabbergasted. “The first thought in my mind was, ‘What is this guy thinking?’ I’m managing the crisis of my lifetime, which is nothing compared to the collective crisis of all the people we are trying to help. It’s one thing to be too busy. It’s another thing to be too busy because you’re scuba diving.”
Benioff may have chickened out that day, but outside and internal opposition to the ongoing contract—CBP “began using Salesforce products this year to ‘manage border activities’ and ‘modernize its recruiting process’”—has in no way deescalated, with Fight for the Future, Color of Change, Demand Progress, Defending Rights and Dissent, Mijente, Presente.org, RAICES, Sum of Us, and other advocates setting up a mock detention center outside the company’s annual conference in San Francisco, California, this week. “We’re demanding that Salesforce cancel that contract,” said one demonstrator.
In June, more than 600 Salesforce employees sent an an open letter to Benioff, writing that "given the inhumane separation of children from their parents currently taking place at the border, we believe that our core value of Equality is at stake and that Salesforce should re-examine our contractual relationship with CBP and speak out against its practices.” But, organizations said this week, he’s “ignored them and said the contract will stay.” Advocates aren’t relenting, though.
“We’ve been incredibly concerned with corporations, particularly the tech corporations, that are facilitating ICE and border patrol’s destruction of immigrant communities,” said Jacinta Gonzalez of Mijente. “It’s a matter of continuing to pressure these investors and executives at these tech companies that are making billions at the expense of immigrants. They are profiting off the suffering of immigrants.”
Family separation may have fallen off the radar for many, or seemed resolved to others, but it remains a crisis. There 182 children kidnapped from the arms of parents who continue to remain under U.S. custody, where every day is another day of trauma—and Salesforce, along with any others doing business with CBP, are complicit. “Your software provides an operational backbone for the agency,” Ryan said, “and thus does directly support CBP in implementing its inhumane and immoral policies. There is no way around this, and there is no room for hair splitting when children are being brutally torn away from parents.”