In Massachusetts, at least a dozen people were arrested Thursday evening at an Amazon office in Cambridge as they held a sit-in protest against the online retailer’s contracts with Immigration and Customs Enforcement. Video from Amazon’s office cameras showed activists with the Jewish-led group Never Again Action blocking elevators, while protesters left a banner outside the building reading “Never Again means No Tech for ICE.” They were condemning Amazon’s attempts to sell controversial facial recognition technology to ICE. Earlier in the day, hundreds of protesters marched from Boston Holocaust Memorial to Amazon’s Cambridge building chanting slogans like “Never again means abolish ICE.” This is one of the protesters.
Never Again Action protester: “As Jews, we have witnessed how technology companies willfully partner with racist governments to support state violence. We know that all of this has happened before and that worse things can happen. We have a story to share with you about a company called International Business Machines, or IBM. In the 1930s, IBM was an American company, but it had subsidiaries all over the world. In Nazi Germany, IBM workers used IBM tools to process millions of census forms and compile the data for government use.”
Never Again Action has led several protests around the country against immigration jails and ICE.