On November 19, 2019, Salesforce co-CEO Mark Benioff was interrupted by shouts from several protestors at the annual Dreamforce conference in downtown San Francisco. The activists were demanding to know why Benioff continued to maintain Salesforce’s controversial relationship with the Customs and Border Protection agency (CBP). Benioff allowed one of the protestors to speak for thirty seconds, before the young man was ushered away.
“I want to tell you why I stopped the program and let him speak for 30 seconds,” Benioff said. “It’s because I value free speech in this country. I value everybody’s speech.”
Salesforce signs contract with CBP
On March 6, 2018, the tech giant announced that CBP would be “deploying Salesforce Analytics, Community Cloud and Service Cloud to modernize its recruiting process, from hire to retire, and manage border activities and digital engagement with citizens.”
The immoral practices of CBP
CBP and the Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) make up the bulk of the Department of Homeland Security (DHS). While ICE has received the lion’s share of the criticism for the manner in which it has been carrying out the Trump Administration’s heavy-handed policies regarding undocumented immigrants, CBP, whose task is the protection of US borders, has also come under fire for its activities.
The appalling treatment of migrants at the US-Mexico border in recent years has been well-documented. A physician who toured two CBP-run detention facilities described them as “torture facilities.” Others, citing the appallingly inhumane conditions of the centers, have called them concentration camps. Most well-publicized is the separation of families. Since July of 2017, CPB agents have separated roughly 5,400 migrant children from their families. Shockingly, between July, 2017 and June, 2018, 207 children younger than the age of five were taken from their parents.
Some might argue that CBP is merely carrying out the directives of the US government. But this ignores the many excesses that the agency has committed. The Guardian reported recently that at least 97 people have been shot and killed by CBP since 2003. The American Civil Liberties Union has uncovered evidence indicating that CBP agents have been physically, sexually and verbally abusing children.
CBP has also been described as rife with corruption. Many of its nefarious activities have come to light recently, as the agency has been beset by scandal after scandal.
“Agents were caught making racist comments in a Facebook group—a group that the chief of the Border Patrol evidently was a member of herself,” wrote journalist Garrett Graff. “At least twelve migrants have died in the agency’s custody since September, and its agents have been accused of everything from sexual abuse of migrant children, to trafficking firearms, to running down a border crosser with a truck. One Border Patrol agent was arrested and charged with being a serial killer.”
Salesforce as a good corporate citizen
Salesforce has fostered a reputation as a good corporate citizen, having donated 1% of its equity to charitable causes. It campaigned in favor of a proposition that would force it to pay a tax benefiting the homeless in San Francisco. In 2019, Benioff and his wife donated $30 million to the University of California at San Francisco to study homelessness, and in 2015, he threatened to reduce Salesforce’s business in Indiana to protest that state’s anti-LBGTQ law. Even the title of his 2019 book, “Trailblazer: The Power of Business as the Greatest Platform for Change,” hints at his vision for Salesforce as a vehicle for positive change. A sentence in the book reads:
“Companies, and the people who lead them, can no longer afford to separate business objectives from the social issues surrounding them. They can no longer view their mission as a set of binary choices: growing vs. giving back, making a profit vs. promoting the public good, or innovating vs. making the world a better place.”
Benioff refuses to back down
Why then, does Benioff continue to insist that Salesforce will not sever its relationship with CBP, a decision that appears to be completely at odds with his personal philosophy?
One strong possibility is money. Neither Salesforce nor CBP has revealed the value of the contract they signed, but one can guess that the financial implications for the software company are significant, as DHS has been reported to spend upwards of $4 billion on “data management.”
Benioff contends that, while he does not agree with the policy of family separation, Salesforce products are not directly involved in carrying out this policy. This argument is disingenuous at best. Even if the company’s services are not used directly in the mistreatment of people—unlike, perhaps, Hewlett Packard’s, whose technology is employed in various ways by the Israeli Defence Forces to subjugate the Palestinians—Salesforce should nevertheless be seen as culpable in the commission of CBP’s crimes. As Jonathan Ryan, executive director of the Refugee and Immigrant Center for Education and Legal Services (RAICES), wrote to Benioff, explaining why his organization was rejecting a $250,000 donation from Salesforce, “Your software provides an operational backbone for the agency, 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, when a mother attempts suicide in an effort to get her children released, and when an eighteen-month-old baby is separated from their mother in detention.”
Salesforce’s employees and customers speak up
Many of Salesforce’s employees seem to agree. Three months after the contract with CBP was announced, 650 employees penned a letter to Benioff demanding that the company end its relationship with the border patrol agency.
“We are particularly concerned about the use of Service Cloud to manage border activities,” the letter read. “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 reexamine our contractual relationship with CBP and speak out against its practices."
In July of 2018, thirty-two companies who are customers or prospective customers of Salesforce made similar demands.
“We are absolutely appalled that Salesforce is providing assistance to government agencies that are violating human rights and is refusing to drop the contract with Customs and Border Protection,” they wrote. “… as long as Salesforce keeps its contracts with Customs and Border Protection, they are still enabling the agency to violate human rights. If every tech company that has any kind of contract with these immigration agencies, immediately cut their contracts, it would make a huge impact and create enormous political pressure for these human rights abuses to end.”
Other tech companies face similar dilemmas
Salesforce is not the only US tech company that has faced a backlash for its relationships with organizations that engage in morally questionable practices. In April of 2019, following an employee petition, Google announced that it would not renew its contract with a Department of Defense drone surveillance project upon its expiration. In August, Amazon pitched its facial recognition to ICE, prompting a backlash from human rights advocates, while IBM employees have been protesting the company’s relationship with ICE and CBP, which has earned it $1.7 billion since 2008.
The protests continue
Benioff has thus far resisted all calls to end Salesforce’s contract with CBP, but this has not deterred activists. The Democratic Socialists of America (DSA) were involved in the protest at Dreamforce in November. They have also scheduled a press conference outside Salesforce’s offices in downtown San Francisco for December 19th at noon to call more attention to the issue. I asked DSA member Julien Ball why he was protesting against Salesforce’s activities.
“Salesforce claims social responsibility as a core value while making tens of millions of dollars in contracts with an agency that is profiting from the deaths of migrants doing nothing more than seeking a better life,” he said. “Unless and until Benioff ends his contract with CBP, his claims at altruism will be nothing more than a fraud.”