Last week, free software developer Seth Vargo pulled the plug on tools he made to work with software developed by his former employer Chef, in protest of Chef's ongoing contracts with US Immigration and Customs Enforcement, a federal agency that has been implicated in crimes against humanity, including ethnic cleansing, family separation, and the deaths of children in its custody.
Chef CEO Barry Crist initially defended his company's ongoing relationship with ICE ("I have made a principled decision, with the support of the Chef executive team, to work with the institutions of our government, regardless of whether or not we personally agree with their various policies... ") but later reversed himself, vowing not to renew the current contract, and pledging to donate the revenues from the contract "to charities that help vulnerable people impacted by the policy of family separation and detention."
Other companies have taken internal and external heat for their relationships with ICE, including Microsoft, Google, Edelman PR, Amazon, Palantir, and Salesforce, but ICE's effectively unlimited budget and willingness to hand out no-bid, cost-plus contracts make it an irresistible target for Beltway Bandits, who are making bank from their contracts.
Andy Bell has created an "open source" list of ICE contractors, presumably for the purposes of retaliation by employees, shareholders, and customers.
Though, as Nat Torkington points out, there are plenty of other companies contracting with institutions that are unmitigated forces for evil in our world: "I wonder who contracts to RJ Reynolds, or Shell, and whether we’ll see lists of those companies too."
