Cancel Culture Strikes Again: ACLU Joins Effort to Get Tech Companies to Cancel ICE
Efforts by the radical left to render law enforcementincapable of doing its job always seem to begin with nullifying immigrationlaws. But, as we have seen in recent months, they don’t end there. Attacks onImmigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) are usually a precursor to widercampaigns to emasculate law enforcement in general, under the guise ofpromoting “social justice.”
The latest offensive against ICE entails pressuring U.S. tech companies to stop selling their products to agencies that enforce immigration laws. This week, the #NoTechForICE campaign, led by a group known as Mijente, enlisted a powerful ally: The American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU). High on Mijente’s and ACLU’s target list are Thomson Reuters and Reed Elsevier which produce the legal research tools Westlaw and LexisNexis. Others are sure to follow.
In announcing the ACLU’s decision to join the #NoTechForICE campaign, the group’s Northern California director Vasudha Talla explained, “Thomson Reuters and Reed Elsevier embody the burgeoning contradictions of technology companies that, in the same breath, claim to be in the business of public service, while they are enabling government agencies to engage in wildly unconstitutional tactics to arrest and incarcerate people in deadly conditions.”
Never mind that neither of these companies are “in the business of public service” – like all other companies, they’re in business to make profits for themselves and their shareholders – or that ICE’s mission is not only constitutional, but protects public safety and saves lives. The effort is built on a successful model that the author Douglas Murray astutely describes in a podcast as an effort to intimidate cowardly corporate executive into appeasing loud mobs by capitulating to their demands in the hopes that doing so will convince the mob to go harass someone else.
Mijente neatly fits the description of a boisterous mob bent on intimidation. The group would have the rest of us believe that it speaks for what they claim are 60 million “Latinx” residents of the United States. While most Hispanic-Americans, including those who are immigrants, see themselves as Americans who share the interests and values of most other Americans, Mijente sees immigration as a tool to gain power. “We’re power. We’re the future. And we’re here,” the group warns on its website, while claiming that they are the ones “under attack”
The rest of us, it seems, are the past and we’d better moveaside. If very recent history is any guide, and the howling mob and its fellowtravelers like the ACLU succeed in browbeating tech companies into haltingsales to ICE, it will not be long before that campaign is expanded to includepolice departments and district attorneys’ offices. Their goal is not just eradicatingimmigration enforcement, or even hamstringing police in general. Rather, theirobjective is imposing a radical ideology through intimidation. And, as usual,it begins with attacking immigration enforcement.