ICE Uses Open Source to Violate Human Rights.

On any given day, 40,000 people are detained by ICE in unsafe and unsanitary conditions with sub-standard medical care and sporadic, if any, access to legal counsel.

These conditions have led directly to nearly two hundred detainee deaths at the hands of ICE.

And if the human costs are not enough to persuade you, consider the financial ones. In 2018, tax payers spent $3.076 billion dollars on DHS Custody Operations. A budget four times greater than the Department of Education's English Language Acquisition programs.

In addition to the cruelty of ICE and the financial costs to tax-payers, ICE is the public face of the United States’ ever-expanding domestic surveillance apparatus. How? Through lucrative contracts with privately held technology companies like Palantir, Microsoft, and even darling GitHub.

How is Open Source Involved?

At present, Palantir has 189 repositories hosted on GitHub, which rely on thousands of open source projects. Every dependency in use by ICE and Palantir contributes to human rights violations. Each dependency is a stone in the wall between reality and the dream of open source as a champion of freedom, liberty and equality.

What can we do if we don't want our work to be used in this way?

Students across the country are organizing to stop Palantir from recruiting on their campuses. Whistleblowers are risking everything to go public detailing how their companies are complicit. International human rights groups are investigating ICE. And immigrant rights activists are working tirelessly to protect vulnerable people from the evils of the current anti-immigrant policies put in place by the Trump administration (and other administrations before his.)

As software developers, we can stand in solidarity. Here's how:

If you have time:

• Support and participate in #NoTechForICE protests and programs.
• Adopt an an Ethical Source license for your current open source software projects.
• Launch alternative libraries under an Ethical Source license.

If you are able do it safely:

• Refuse to contribute code to Palantir's projects.
• Refuse to accept issues and pull requests from Palantir employees.

If you have money:

A little goes a long way. If it is safe to do so, share some of your financial resources with programs with a track record of direct action, harm reduction and remediation, and systemic changes. The following is a small sample of organizations curated by the #EthicalSource team.

• Become a dues-paying member of Mijente, a pro-Latinx, pro-Black, pro-woman, pro-queer, pro-worker organization dedicated to restoring the liberty of those taken by ICE.
• Donate $100 per month to Fund Club, which funds a different grassroots, under-funded non-profit social and economic justice program every month.
• Donate to the Contributor Covenant and Ethical Source Open Collective.