The Cloud Beneath the Camps
Salesforce Helped ICE Build Its Cloud. The Rest of Us Have to Build a Firewall.
“The cloud services companies of all sizes; the cloud is for everyone. The cloud is a democracy.”
— Marc Benioff
“Every tool is a weapon if you hold it right.”
— Ani DiFranco
In 2018, Marc Benioff personally requested a call with me.
The country was in moral freefall. The government had separated thousands of children from their parents at the border. I was directing an organization that was fighting to reunite those families. We were tracing government spreadsheets, piecing together lists of children who had been scattered across the continent like evidence in a crime the state was determined to conceal.
Salesforce, the company Benioff founded and still runs, was under fire for selling technology to Immigration and Customs Enforcement. Through his team, Benioff reached out to say he wanted to speak with me directly. He said he cared deeply about what was happening. He said he wanted to help.
I believed him. I cleared my schedule and waited for the call he had asked for.
He never called.
He was scuba diving in Hawaii.
Later, he sent an email about family values.
That was the summer when I learned how the powerful cleanse their conscience. They call it corporate social responsibility, but it is really the ancient art of moral laundering.
The Gift We Refused
That year, Salesforce offered my organization a donation of two hundred and fifty thousand dollars. We sent it back.
It was not an easy decision. We were fighting to get children released from cages. We needed every dollar we could find. But we understood that to take that money would mean participating in the same logic that created the cages in the first place.
The story was covered by reporters from San Francisco to Austin to London. Salesforce insisted that its contract with Customs and Border Protection did not directly involve child separation. That was true in the same way a gun manufacturer can say it never pulled the trigger.
For one brief moment, the refusal of that donation felt like a rupture in the moral fabric of power. It proved that conscience was still possible.
Seven years later, that moment feels like a fossil.
The Return of the Contract
This week, The New York Times reported that Salesforce has renewed and expanded its federal contract with Immigration and Customs Enforcement. The company will now provide artificial intelligence and data infrastructure to “modernize” immigration enforcement operations and help ICE “boost its workforce.”
The word “modernize” is the euphemism of our age. It means to automate cruelty.
In 2018, Benioff at least tried to perform remorse. In 2025, he no longer bothers. There is no donation, no phone call, no attempt to hide behind the language of empathy. There is only business.
The Cloud as a Cage
The machinery of separation has evolved. It no longer depends on barbed wire or buses. It lives in databases and servers. It lives in the cloud.
Salesforce provides the digital infrastructure that allows the state to track, sort, and deport human beings with algorithmic precision. The same tools that let a corporation follow its customers now let ICE follow a child. The same software that helps a company predict a buyer’s behavior can predict a family’s movements.
In the name of “customer relationship management,” Salesforce has built the architecture of erasure.
Inside the detention centers where I still work, the technology is invisible but everywhere. Intake systems, facial recognition tools, case management software, automated notifications. Each click of a mouse sends a ripple through the lives of people whose names the system treats as data fields.
What was once chaos has become efficiency.
The cruelty is now clean.
The Silence of 2025
In 2018, there was outrage. Employees walked out. Journalists investigated. Lawyers debated ethics. The refusal of Salesforce’s donation became a small symbol of conscience.
Today, the silence is almost total.
Perhaps it is fear. Perhaps fatigue. Or perhaps something deeper has happened. The professional classes, once the stewards of democratic norms, have grown accustomed to complicity. They have learned how to live inside a machine that rewards quiet obedience and punishes moral clarity.
The same people who once declared “Never Again” now check quarterly earnings reports while the machinery of persecution hums along. The same executives who once gave speeches about diversity and inclusion now sell their code to the regime.
Authoritarianism does not only arrive through soldiers. It arrives through service contracts.
The Failure of Modern Virtue
Marc Benioff once styled himself as the conscience of capitalism. He built an empire on the language of equality, philanthropy, and inclusion. He hosted panels about gender equity and environmental sustainability. He positioned Salesforce as a moral brand.
That is the most dangerous kind of power. Not naked cruelty, but cruelty dressed in virtue.
Now, under a government that imprisons and expels the vulnerable in the name of national purity, Benioff’s company has become one of its most useful private partners. The moral mask has been dropped, and what remains is the logic that has always driven empire: profit without memory.
He is no longer scuba diving. He is floating on the surface of an ocean made of data, watching his reflection, and mistaking it for light.
What the Cloud Conceals
I often think about that first conversation that never happened. What would I have said if he had picked up the phone?
I would have told him that technology is not neutral. That software is never just a tool. That every piece of code carries within it a vision of the world it was designed to serve.
When a company builds technology that enables the targeting and detention of human beings, it is not building a platform. It is building a prison.
The cloud, for all its metaphors of openness and freedom, is in fact a fortress. It conceals the concentration of power. It allows repression to scale globally while hiding the evidence inside proprietary systems.
When history asks who built the architecture of digital authoritarianism, the answer will not be a tyrant’s name. It will be a list of corporate vendors.
The Firewall
I write this from the same kind of place where I worked in 2018: inside immigration detention centers, where families are still separated, only now under the full authority of the MAGA regime. The technology has advanced, but the cruelty has remained the same.
The difference is that now, even those who once pretended to care have stopped pretending.
This is why the Firewall exists.
The Firewall is a network of professionals who refuse to let their labor be used for repression. It is an organizing framework for engineers, lawyers, teachers, doctors, journalists, and believers who still remember what a conscience sounds like.
Our work now is to turn moral awareness into collective action.
The Firewall views the technology sector as a critical front in the struggle for human dignity. Every line of code and every design decision can either expand freedom or tighten control. We believe tech workers have the power, and the responsibility, to draw that line.
If you work in technology and share this conviction, join The Firewall. Together we can build a community that refuses to code for cruelty, that rejects systems built to erase human beings, and that redefines progress as the defense of humanity itself.
The cloud has been claimed by empire. It is time to reclaim it for humanity.
When Marc Benioff stood me up in 2018, I did not yet understand that I was witnessing something larger than a personal slight. I was watching the performance of a civilization losing its moral nerve.
Seven years later, that performance has ended. There are no more speeches, no more scuba dives, no more donations meant to distract from the blood on the code.
What remains is silence, and the cold hum of servers carrying out their orders.
But beneath that hum, something else is rising. A network of professionals who remember the sound of human decency. A movement that refuses to let conscience die quietly.
That is the Firewall.
And we are only beginning.
Call to Action
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