Hundreds Of Activists Across 6 Cities Rallied To Demand Amazon Drop Contracts With ICE
December 1, 2025 | Press Releases
This holiday weekend, protestors across Chicago (IL), Los Angeles (CA), New York City (NY), Oakland (CA), San Bernardino (CA), and Washington, D.C. rallied against Amazon’s contracts powering ICE. As Amazon enjoys one of its highest sales volume seasons of the year, community members demanded that the corporation end its complicity in Trump’s detention and deportation agenda by serving as the technological backbone for ICE’s surveillance machine.
“This holiday season, Amazon is not only profiting from squeezing workers and small businesses — it is profiting from ICE raids in our communities. Through Amazon lucrative cloud contracts with the federal government and ICE contractors, Amazon has equipped the Trump administration with a degree of surveillance and tracking that we have never seen in this country. As a result, many communities are living in fear of being abducted and forced to leave their families this holiday season. As Amazon and other Silicon Valley corporations deepen corrupt alliances with the Trump administration, it’s more important than ever that people stand up and fight back,” stated Athena Coalition Director Ryan Gerety.
Protesters claim that beyond contributing millions to the president’s inauguration and ballroom fund, Jeff Bezos and Amazon executives are further enabling Trump’s anti-immigrant agenda by providing cloud computing services to ICE. These partnerships are only expanding: Last week, Amazon announced it is investing $50 billion to expand AI and supercomputing for the Trump administration.
“Amazon’s record-breaking profits are built on our bodies, our safety, and our lives. We are not gears in Bezos’ billion-dollar engine; we are the people who make the entire operation possible, and without us, Amazon collapses. There is no morality in a company that treats workers as disposable and turns its technology into weapons of state violence. From the warehouse floor to the tech offices, workers are organizing. We refuse exploitation, we refuse surveillance, and we refuse blood money. When we stand united, Amazon fears the future we are building,” stated Sultana Hossain, recording secretary of Amazon Labor Union–IBT Local 1.
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, as of 2023, CBP was hosting at least 62% of its systems on Amazon servers. This included programs “critical to the ongoing success of CBP’s mission.”
“Amazon’s contracts with Israel and ICE - like Project Nimbus are enabling oppression and violence. We as Amazon employees work hard to enable businesses to get up and running and achieve their goals, not to enable violence and oppression. Human rights must come first and these contracts must be dropped,” stated an Amazon corporate worker remaining anonymous out of fear of retaliation from the company.
Without continued access to AWS, the document states, “DHS and CBP would experience catastrophic, nation-wide outage impacts.”
“The people of Oakland deserve thriving communities that are safe and fully resourced, with good jobs and affordable housing. Amazon Web Services targets and tracks our neighbors by hosting ICE’s surveillance machine and through a new partnership between private Amazon Ring cameras and Flock cameras. Surveillance doesn’t make us more safe; resources do. We have had enough of Amazon’s support for the Trump regime. We are spending our dollars at local businesses that provide good jobs, support the local economy and take care of our neighbors. Together, we keep us safe,” stated Kate O’Hara, Executive Director of East Bay Alliance for a Sustainable Economy (EBASE).
As Amazon Founder and Chairman Jeff Bezos cozy up to the Trump administration, protestors say, 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. Protestors also cite that Amazon continues to win billions of dollars in local and state subsidies to build out data centers.
“Warehouses have loomed in the Inland Empire for many years, and Amazon has a major footprint. Amazon has brought more pollution, unsafe jobs and low wages that don’t allow workers to make ends meet. Now Amazon is playing a critical role in the raids happening across our region,” said Sheheryar Kaoosji, Executive Director of the Warehouse Worker Resource Center. “Amazon is providing key tech infrastructure for ICE’s attacks on immigrant communities and workers. We have seen Amazon Web Services grow with private technology contracts for the purposes of surveillance and information collection about our communities.”
“The people of Washington, DC refuse to give our money to corporations like Amazon, Whole Foods, and Target that are complicit in our oppression. Instead, we’re going to invest in local small businesses that align with our values,” stated Keya Chatterjee, Executive Director of Free DC.
“Amazon has been using the stolen fruits of their workers’ labor to organize the logistics of Trump’s deportation machine. We need to hold Amazon and other corporations accountable by hitting them in the pocket through boycotts and strikes,” stated Kobi Guillory of Chicago Alliance Against Racist and Political Repression.
After Amazon’s recent mass layoffs, over 1,000 Amazon corporate employees published an open letter exposing the harms caused by their company leadership’s AI rollout and development. The letter warns that Amazon’s PR about AI distracts from the company’s power and land grab for data centers, threatening public water supply and increasing electricity bills. It also opposes Amazon supporting a “militarized surveillance state,” including through its partnerships with ICE.
“We’re not relying on our management chain for sound or data driven decisions anymore,” said an anonymous Amazon software engineer who works in AWS. “They’re making us use AI even when it doesn’t make sense, all while helping build new gas plants to power AI data centers and threatening us with layoffs if we don’t blindly comply. I signed the letter because I see where this is going. When the AI bubble pops, Amazon will have taken a huge amount of land, water, and wealth, and the public needs to know,” stated an Amazon tech worker organizing with Amazon Employees for Climate Justice.
Workers outside the US also joined the movement against Amazon this weekend. From November 28 to December 1, 2025, Amazon workers, unions and allies across six continents joined forces under the banner Make Amazon Pay to strike and protest in global action co-convened by UNI Global Union and Progressive International. From New Delhi to Montreal and beyond, thousands took to the streets, picket lines, warehouses, offices, and data centers to Make Amazon Pay for labour abuses, environmental degradation and threats to democracy.