INSUBCONTINENT EXCLUSIVE:
A dozen or so people accompanied by a 14-foot, 800-pound cage gathered in downtown San Francisco Tuesday morning to protest
Salesforce&scontract with United States Customs and Border Patrol (CBP), the agency within the Department of Homeland Security responsible
for enforcing the Trump Administration&szero-tolerance immigration policy.
Today is the first day ofDreamforce, Salesforce annual user
conference that attracts some 200,000 people.The protesters claim Salesforce, whichsigned an agreement with CPB in March,is complicit in the
actions of CBP and should be held accountable.
Salesforce has a moral and ethical obligation to end this contract,& one protestor
shouted.
The sign plastered to the front of the cage — a mock-up of those reportedly used in CBP facilities to hold separatedchildren of
migrant families — read &Detention center powered by Salesforce.
It hard to miss an 800-pound cage rolling down the street,& Jelani Drew,
lead organizer of the demonstration and campaigner for the nonprofit advocacy group Fight for the Future, told TechCrunch
&They had to look and that was the goal.
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Almost 1,800 families were separated at the United
States -Mexico border from October 2016 through February of this year, per Reuters
And another 2,342 children were separated from 2,206 parents between May 5 and June 9, according to Vox.
In late June, President Donald
Trump signed an executive order to end family separation, though the zero-tolerance policy, which mandates that any persons entering the
United States illegally be prosecuted,remains.
Salesforce chief executive officer Marc Benioff, who has a reputation for advocating for
liberal causes and politics, has said the deal with CBP does not involveCBP United States -Mexico border policies
CBP, rather, uses some Salesforce cloud tools, specificallySalesforce Analytics, Community Cloud and Service Cloud, to bolster its
recruiting process and to &manage border activities.
When asked for comment, Salesforce told TechCrunch the cloud-computing company respects
the right to protest and pointed us in the direction of Benioff tweets, which reaffirm the business doesn''t have an agreement with
Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) and that the CBP contract is unrelated to family separation.
Our employees asked me to review
how CBP uses us I included them
I&ve proudly engaged discussed this with all our Ohana
Salesforce doesnt work with CBP regarding separation of families at the border
We dont have an agreement with ICE
Im proud of our Ohana their Kuleana!
mdash; Marc Benioff (@Benioff) July 20, 2018
That tweet, posted in July, was a response to a petition
signed by 650 Salesforce employees, who took issue with the CBP contract, specifically CBP use of Salesforce Service Cloud to manage
activities at the border.
We cannot cede responsibility for the use of the technology we create&particularly when we have reason to believe
that it is being used to aid practices so irreconcilable to our values,& the employees wrote
&Those values often feel abstract, and it is easier to uphold them when they are not being tested
They are being tested now.
In addition to his tweet, Benioff wrote in a memo to employees at the time that he is &opposed to separating
children from their families at the border.
It is immoral
I have personally financially supported legal groups helping families at the border
I also wrote to the White House to encourage them to end this horrible situation.
Salesforce co-CEO Keith Block said the company
woulddonate $1 million to organizations helping families separated at the United States border and that Salesforce would match employee
In his tweet, he did not specify which organizations the company would support.
Today, Block similarly took to Twitter to announce that the
nonprofit arm of Salesforce would donate $18 million to &Bay Area causes.& The San Francisco Chronicle reportsthat the San Francisco and
Oakland Unified School Districts will receive $15.5 million, Hamilton Families, Larkin Street Youth Services and the San Francisco Food Bank
will receive$2 million and the San Francisco Park Alliance will receive $500,000.
Today protest was organized byFight for the Future, Color
of Change, Demand Progress, Defending Rights and Dissent, Mijente, Presente.org, RAICES and Sum of Us
RAICES,The Refugee and Immigrant Center for Education and Legal Services, recently rejected a $250,000 donation from Salesforce because of
its contract with CBP.
Benioff contacted RAICES executive director Jonathan Ryan over the summer to discuss the opposition to Salesforce
contract with CBP, according to a new report from The Guardian
The pair were scheduled to speak until Benioff canceled last minute
&I am sorry I&m scuba diving right now,& Benioff reportedly wrote to Ryan.
We&ve reached out to RAICES for comment.
Google reportedly
backing out of military contract after public backlash
Benioff and Salesforce are among several large tech companies that have struck
controversial deals with government agencies
Employees at both Amazon and Microsoft have protested their companies& contracts with ICE.Googlereportedly decided not to renew a Pentagon
contractafter employees resigned in protest of the search giant involvement with controversial AI research project Project Maven.
Jacinta
Gonzalez, senior campaign organizer with Mijente, a national hub for Latinx organizers, told TechCrunch the she and the other protesters are
hopeful tech companies will drop their contracts with both CBP and ICE.
We&ve been incredibly concerned with corporations, particularly the
tech corporations, that are facilitating ICE and border patrol destruction of immigrant communities,& Gonzalez said
It a matter of continuing to pressure these investors and executives at thesetech companies that are making billions at the expense of
They are profiting off the suffering of immigrants.
