Support for ICE has, thankfully, been on the decline. About 2/3rds of Americans think that ICE has gone too far in enforcing immigration laws; killing nurses helping women being attacked by ICE and boasting about silencing dissent is not the way to win people on your side. The repeated civil rights abuses and advanced surveillance tactics have pushed the liberty interested law students at Harvard to call for the school to divest from companies and firms that enable ICE. The Crimson has coverage:
Roughly 50 Harvard Law School students rallied Wednesday outside Wasserstein Hall, urging the University to divest from major tech companies they say help power immigration enforcement and to cut recruiting ties with law firms they allege collaborate with U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement.
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The petition names Palantir, Meta, Alphabet, Amazon, and Microsoft, alleging that the companies provide the data infrastructure, cloud computing, and surveillance technology that powers immigration enforcement…Organizers are also demanding that OCS suspend outreach from four private law firms — Latham & Watkins, Davis Wright Tremaine, Greenberg Traurig, and Fox Rothschild — and several U.S. Attorney’s offices that the petition says have collaborated with ICE within the past year.
A lot of this is just true: ICE ordered $30M worth of tracking tech from Palantir last year, the Department of Homeland Services houses loads of their information using Amazon Web Servies, and ICE has tripled their reliance on Microsoft in the last 6 months. That said, it is harder to find smoking guns for the named firms. Latham & Watkins signaled readiness to work with firms that have ICE interactions and Davis Wright Tremaine fought against ICE cracking down on free speech in 2019. That doesn’t scream complicity with ICE to me. None of the named firms responded to The Crimson for comment, but an announcement could be a good opportunity for them to either clear their names or contextualize whatever work is being read as ICE collaboration. Doing so could also run the risk of getting picked on by the administration — bad optics all around, but there’s the rub.
Part of the student petition asks that firms and federal agencies publicly pledge that they will not represent companies that help ICE before they are allowed back on campus. This lines up with efforts made by Georgetown and George Washington law students that tried to prevent their campuses from becoming ICE recruitment centers.
Power to the students. As they put pressure on the administration to be on the right side of history, may it encourage law students elsewhere to do the same at their schools.
Harvard Law Students Demand Divestment From Tech Giants, Ban on Law Firms They Say Enable ICE [The Crimson]
Chris Williams became a social media manager and assistant editor for Above the Law in June 2021. Prior to joining the staff, he moonlighted as a minor Memelord™ in the Facebook group Law School Memes for Edgy T14s . He endured Missouri long enough to graduate from Washington University in St. Louis School of Law. He is a former boat builder who is learning to swim and is interested in rhetoric, Spinozists and humor. Getting back in to cycling wouldn’t hurt either. You can reach him by email at cwilliams@abovethelaw.com and by tweet at @WritesForRent.
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