Immigrants’ and workers’ right advocates delivered more than a quarter of a million petition signatures—including many from the Daily Kos community—to Amazon locations in over half a dozen cities this week, demanding the giant cut off ties with unshackled federal immigration agencies that are separating immigrant families within our communities and at our southern border.
Amazon has helped enable mass deportation policies by providing essential technological infrastructure to the Department of Homeland Security: Amazon Web Services is Amazon’s cloud technology that mass hosts and stores information, and the Department of Homeland Security uses AWS cloud technology to store, sort, and share massive amounts of data to target immigrants.
In protests held on Amazon’s lucrative Prime Day in cities like Seattle, Washington, New York, and the Washington, D.C. area—home to Amazon founder and billionaire Jeff Bezos—activists, including Amazon employees, called on the giant to stop aiding mass deportation policies, as well as improve outrageous working conditions for Amazon workers (employees have said they’ve been forced to urinate in bottles in order to save work time).
“For too long, big tech has run unchecked,” said Maru Mora-Villalpando, an immigrant activist at Resistencia. “They have been allowed to profit off an unjust immigration system and off our community’s trauma and abuse. That ends now. We need to show our communities the power we hold when we stand together. We can be the coalition to hold big tech accountable for the first time. We can force Amazon and Palantir to stop helping DHS and ICE.”
In the Monday action outside an Amazon location in New York, activists left Amazon-branded boxes with sad faces wrapped in aluminum wrapping, representing the foil blankets that families and children are given as their only source of warmth in deplorable Border Patrol facilities. Near Bezos’ home on Tuesday, guards blocked “community members from the public sidewalk,” Daily Kos tweeted. They did manage to deliver the hundreds of thousands of petition signatures, promising "’We'll be back’ to demand Amazon cut ties with ICE and respect workers now.”
Back in Seattle, Lee also “pointed to the U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) agency’s requests to perform face surveillance searches on images in state driver’s license databases in Washington and other states. She said that Amazon has pitched the agency on its facial recognition technology, Rekognition.” This practice has earned a rebuke from Amazon’s own employees, who penned an open letter to their boss.
“We are deeply concerned that Amazon is implicated, providing infrastructure and services that enable ICE and DHS,” they said, also condemning the Trump administration’s barbaric “zero tolerance” policy, where Border Patrol and ICE carried out the forcible separation of thousands of families at the border.
Monday’s action outside an Amazon store in New York.
Advocates at Monday’s action outside an Amazon store in New York.
Advocates outside a property owned by Bezos in New York on Monday.
Advocates outside a property owned by Bezos in New York on Monday.
An advocate marching to a property owned by Bezos in New York on Monday.
There’s no understating how truly dangerous this technology can be in endangering the future of immigrant communities in the U.S. The Trump administration has threatened mass raids across ten U.S. cities in its effort to deport thousands of immigrant families, many of whom have failed to receive due process due to government incompetence, some of it intentional. At the border, children are dying in immigration custody. This must stop—and Amazon has a part to play in this.
