Microsoft staff call on company to end ICE contract

Enlarge / Satya Nadella, CEO of Microsoft, speaks at the Microsoft Annual Shareholders Meeting in Bellevue, Washington, on November 30, 2016. (credit: Jason Redmond, Getty Images)

Microsoft staff members are calling on CEO Satya Nadella to terminate the company's contract with Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE). In an open letter published by The New York Times, employees say that they "refuse to be complicit" in ICE's policy of breaking apart migrant families that come to the US without legal documentation.

Since May, the agency has been systematically separating children from their parents, and the kids have been housed in former warehouses and camps around the country. Microsoft's involvement comes from the company's Azure Government cloud computing platform: a segregated set of government-only data centers and cloud services operated exclusively by US citizens, with certifications and approval to fulfill certain government needs. In January, the company announced in a blog post that it was proud to support ICE's "IT modernization" using Azure Government. This language was briefly removed "by mistake" from the blog post but has subsequently been reinstated.

In the view of the open letter's signatories-and no small number of Microsoft employees on Twitter and the company's internal social media-this cooperation is unacceptable, and the company should take an "ethical stand, and put children and families above profits." They're calling on the company to cancel its contract with ICE (claimed to be worth $19.4 million), create a public policy that neither Microsoft nor its contractors will work with clients violating international human rights law, and show greater transparency over contracts with government agencies.

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