This Black Friday Weekend, Skip Amazon

Each Thanksgiving holiday weekend, from Black Friday to Cyber Monday, Amazon enjoys its highest sales season of the year. This year, however, Amazon is not just profiting from consumer spending and worker exploitation. It is also profiting from raids and deportations that Immigrations and Customs Enforcement (ICE) is conducting across the country. 

The Trump administration has been laser-focused on expanding ICE’s detention and deportation activity. It has increased the agency’s budget by 400 percent, weaponized it to attack its political opponents, and drastically increased its hiring of new agents. 

To equip ICE with more expansive surveillance capabilities to power these raids, Trump has tapped his tech billionaire friends. Amazon Web Services (AWS) is the computational powerhouse behind the Department of Homeland Security (DHS), the umbrella agency for ICE, and hosts the Palantir-designed Investigative Case Management system ICE used to track and target people for deportation. 

According to a Customs and Border Patrol (CBP) solicitation document CBP was hosting at least 62 percent of its systems on Amazon servers as of 2023. This included programs “critical to the ongoing success of CBP’s mission.”  

In the face of immigration raids, illegal deportations, and the deployment of troops on our streets, Amazon is doubling down on its support for the Trump administration. Amazon just announced that it is investing another $50 billion into expanding its AI and cloud computing services for the Trump administration. Amazon says the investments will “add nearly 1.3 gigawatts of AI and supercomputing capacity across AWS Top Secret, AWS Secret, and AWS GovCloud (US) Regions by building data centers with advanced compute and networking technologies.”

At the same time, Amazon is expanding surveillance partnerships with local law enforcement. Earlier this year, Amazon Ring partnered with police contractors Flock and Axon to expand police surveillance through the tens of millions of Amazon Ring cameras. Civil rights advocates have warned that ICE could get access to this camera footage either through police departments or directly through these companies.

This expansion of tech and surveillance power is crucial to Trump’s consolidation of power and anti-immigrant agenda. Through a vast network of surveillance technology companies and data brokers, companies like Palantir collect sensitive information about us, and then store and process that data on the AWS platform. ICE then uses all this data and processing power to track and target people for deportations. 

ICE would not be able to carry out its enforcement regime without Amazon’s computing capacity.  As internal documents make clear, without continued access to Amazon’s services “DHS and CBP would experience catastrophic, nation-wide outage impacts.”

Amazon has profited handsomely off of its investments in federal government infrastructure. As Amazon Founder and Chairman Jeff Bezos cozies  up to the Trump administration, the billionaire and his corporation continue to benefit: Amazon has won $2.8 billion in federal tax savings from the “One Big Beautiful Bill Act” (OBBBA), at least $831 million for Amazon-owned “Project Kuiper” satellite internet meant to fund rural broadband access through the Build Back Better Act, and several additional billions for U.S. Space Force rocket launches through the Pentagon. 

That’s why people are coming together at Amazon locations on Cyber Monday to say, ‘No Tech for ICE!’ From Southern California to Oakland to DC to Chicago to New York City, we demand that Amazon drop its contracts with ICE, end its complicity with ongoing raids across the country, and withdraw support for Trump’s inhumane and antidemocratic agenda.

This holiday weekend’s actions are one step toward challenging the power of corporate monopolies like Amazon. It’s time we weaken Amazon’s power locally and make it much harder for Amazon to operate in our communities. We must protest Amazon’s contracts with ICE, and when we come together, we can do so much more.

We can fight to end contracts that our local governments and school districts have with Amazon. We can pull back public subsidies and tax breaks we hand over to the corporation. We can stop the expansion of warehouses and data centers by Big Tech corporations like Amazon. We can stand with local businesses and workers. We can force Amazon to pay its fair share in taxes so that we can have good schools and health care. By taking all of these steps, we will strengthen our local economies and wrangle our power back from billionaire interests.