Friend,
ICE is carrying out an agenda that terrorizes immigrants. After nearly 2 decades of sexual assault1 and family separation,2 this week a courageous whistleblower stepped forward to reveal that ICE is forcibly sterilizing women.3
ICE uses tracking technology from Palantir to carry out its missions--and that technology is funded by massive investment corporations like BlackRock. If we can turn off the money pipeline into Palantir, we can strike a blow against ICE.
Today, we are in the streets to demand #NoTechForIce! Sign our petition in solidarity!
BlackRock profits by financing fossil fuel corporations that cause the climate crisis, which is forcing families to migrate. Then, BlackRock makes money on the other end by investing in cruel, anti-immigrant tech like Palantir. If we can turn off BlackRock’s money pipeline, we can shut down ICE’s cruelty for good!
This week, whistleblower Dawn Whooten courageously stepped forward to reveal ICE’s latest cruelty. But it’s important to comprehend the extent to which this is not a novel abuse. This is a return to the darkest parts of our nation’s history, and its legacy with race based eugenics. As PBS writes:4
“Coerced sterilization is a shameful part of America’s history, and one doesn’t have to go too far back to find examples of it. Used as a means of controlling “undesirable” populations – immigrants, people of color, poor people, unmarried mothers, the disabled, the mentally ill – federally-funded sterilization programs took place in 32 states throughout the 20th century. Driven by prejudiced notions of science and social control, these programs informed policies on immigration and segregation.
As historian William Deverell explains in a piece discussing the “Asexualization Acts” that led to the sterilization of more than 20,000 California men and women,“If you are sterilizing someone, you are saying, if not to them directly, ‘Your possible progeny are inassimilable, and we choose not to deal with that.’”
ICE does not carry out these atrocities in a vacuum. It carries them out with the aid of companies like Palantir--a data analytics company that provides technology to Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) to help identify, track, and target immigrants, refugees, and asylum-seekers for detention and deportation. BlackRock is a company which has invested heavily into the company, and we are calling you to ADD YOUR NAME to say NO technological financing for the agency which locks away children. BlackRock is a publicly traded company, and thus, uniquely susceptible to public pressure. BlackRock must STOP funding Palantir immediately!
Palantir has received over $200 million in contracts[5] to design and run software systems for ICE, enabling a racist and unaccountable government agency that conducts surveillance, mass raids, detentions, family separations, and deportations.
This has included providing technology used to arrest hundreds of family members of migrant children who crossed the border alone, a precursor to the Trump Administration’s horrific family separation policy. In August 2019, Palantir systems enabled a workplace raid in Mississippi resulting in the arrest of 680 migrant workers.
ICE can’t implement its hate based policies without Palantir’s tech support, and Palantir relies on BlackRock cash.
For Future Generations,
Rev. Yearwood
Founder & President
Hip Hop Caucus
Sources:
https://www.splcenter.org/news/2020/06/17/family-separation-under-trump-administration-timeline
https://www.usaspending.gov/search/3da1975836d184cbc3f5044c797a3b3e
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