Amazon, Microsoft and other companies make millions thanks to policies

The U.S. government's immigration control and surveillance services have powerful allies in Silicon Valley.

This is the main complaint raised in a report presented in the U.S. by several organizations that state that the country's big technology companies are earning millions of dollars at the expense of immigrants.

Companies

The U.S. Department of Homeland Security and its Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) service rely on the latest technology to achieve their goal of controlling irregular immigration.

The report targets three companies in particular: Amazon, Microsoft and PalantirThe company accuses them of providing tools that facilitate the surveillance, tracking, detention and deportation of people.

"These technologies are being used in real time and many companies are benefiting," said Jacinta Gonzalez of the Mijente organization, which conducted the research in conjunction with the National Immigration Project and Immigrant Defense Project.

Different functionalities

The tools discussed in the report can be used to identify and locate undocumented immigrants, recruit new Border Patrol agents, or create innovative surveillance systems.

Amazon has more federal approvals than any other tech company to store data from different government agencies: 204 approvals, compared to 150 for Microsoft, 31 for Salesforce and 27 for Google.

Jeff Bezos' company has made extensive use of these authorizations and serves as the Department of Homeland Security's (DHS) database for storing biometric information from 230 million unique identities.

Most of this biometric data is fingerprint records, but there are also 36.5 million facial records and 2.8 million eye iris records.

Amazon Web Services (AWS), a subsidiary of Amazon, sells cloud storage services and has a US$6.8 billion contract with the DSNwhich makes it the company's main contractor.

This method of cloud storage allows local law enforcement, for example, to access federal data on private individuals.

In turn, federal immigration agents can access local law enforcement information such as license plate data. even in cases in which the local jurisdiction has chosen not to cooperate with federal immigration forces.

BBC Mundo contacted AWS for its reaction to the publication of the report and a company spokesperson responded that there was "no comment".

For its part, Palantir, a company co-founded by billionaire Peter Thiel, a supporter of President Donald Trump, also plays a key role in information management for ICE.

Thus, it created the Falcon Search and Analysis tool, which helps authorities analyze data and produce intelligence reports.

Workers' reaction

Microsoft's case is similar to that of Amazon. The company led by Satya Nadella announced this year that its cloud computing company Azure signed a contract with ICE.

For company executives, this was an important entry into the lucrative government agency market.

The company's employees, however, did not receive the news with the same enthusiasm.

Hundreds of them signed a letter to Nadella requesting that the company to terminate the US $$19.4 billion contract with ICE and to adopt a policy of non-collaboration with certain customers.

"We believe that Microsoft should take an ethical stance y put children and families over the benefits", they wrote.

"As the people who build the technologies that Microsoft profits from, we refuse to be complicit."

When asked by BBC Mundo about this controversy, Microsoft referred us to the statement issued by Nadella in response to the protest letter from his employees:

"I want to be clear: Microsoft is not working with the U.S. government on any projects related to the separation of children from their families at the border..

"Our current cloud computing engagement with ICE is limited to supporting mail, scheduling, messaging and document management tasks."

Not just technology

But it's not just technology companies that are under scrutiny.

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2017 only, ICE spent almost US$3 billion to pay for the alien detention system.which deals with cases that are pending before the courts or whose deportation has already been agreed upon.

A majority of these sites are owned or managed by private companies, which in the past months of May and June were heavily criticized for doing business with the separation of families.

Not to mention important airlines such as American Airlines, Delta, Southwest, Frontier, Frontier, Alaska Airlines and United who rent their planes for the transfer of migrants and who have also been in the spotlight.