AT&T Greases The Deportation Machine: Join The Boycott Against Them

 

<Courtesy Of People's Action>

The mass kidnappings orchestrated by Trump's paramilitary immigration army have forced Americans to confront some uncomfortable realities. One of them is the preponderance of corporations taking advantage of their knee-bending with the Trump regime, either to capitalize on their proximity with its kleptocratic army of grifters, cranks and sycophants, or -- in this case -- help grease the skids for its deportation machine.

Of course, this is hardly a new problem. Corporations are always eager to service the worst actors in their manic pursuit of double digit percentage growth every year. The obvious parallel is Nazi Germany, for whom IG Farben mass produced the substance (Zyklon B) used in the gas chambers; BMW, Daimler-Benz, Krupp and Siemens freely used concentration camp slave laborer in their factories; and Deutsche Bank, Trump's lender of last resort, and Dresdner Bank participated in the "Ayanization" (confiscation) of Jewish property, and financed the Nazi state's various unsavory projects, such as the Auschwitz extermination camp.

And, as a friend of mine reminded me today, you also have the example of IBM, one of many feral Big Tech entities that's developed specialized vetting software for use against immigrants, among their many, many other sins, such as selling computers for South Africa's apartheid regime in the 1970s -- and more recently, the Netanyahu regime, in Israel. After all, efficiency is the most highly prized asset in committing any type of war crime, and as these companies demonstrate, they have no problem helping the worst pariah governments commit it.

So AT&T is, sadly, hardly unique in that respect. But I'll let these words from People's Action speak for themselves:

"As you know, Trump's deportation machine has been targeting Chicago and greater Illinois. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) and Customs and Border Patrol (CBP) have terrorized our neighborhoods, rolled tear gas into the places we live, and violated our rights.

"And, behind them, big corporations are profiting off our pain. They're contracting with the Department of Homeland Security, CBP, and ICE. Among them is AT&T, a multi-billion-dollar corporation with multi-million-dollar government contracts.

"That’s why we, our Illinois member organizations The People’s Lobby and ONE People’s Campaign, and our allies just mobilized 1,000 people in and around Chicago and Illinois to tell AT&T that we know what they’re doing. And, we’re not going to take it. At 18 stores all around the area, people like you and me rallied to tell them to drop their contracts.

"And, if they don’t, we pledged not to buy or upgrade any of their plans or products in the holiday season. We invite you to join the thousands of people who already took the pledge. Anyone can join–even if you don’t use AT&T.

"What took place in Illinois is part of pivots in our organizing to meet the moment. Instead of just naming and shaming AT&T CEO John Stankey and AT&T’s big shareholders, we asked people to join us in imposing a financial cost on them. And they did, with the Chicago Teachers Union and May Day Strong helping to lead the way.

"We’ve still got a lot to learn. But as thousands of people continue to flock to sign our pledge, we think we may be onto something here. Tonight we’re going to build on what we started in Illinois with a big coalition to hold even more corporations accountable. Please join us.

"The Organizing Revival is alive and thriving thanks to your support and organizing. We can do new things to get different results–but it’s going to take all of us."

So, if you want to call out AT&T off its complicity, you can go here, to the relevant link:
https://actionnetwork.org/petitions/att?link_id=1&can_id=4e6c8046819e1ba183f676fa03eddc7a&source=email-att-never-saw-it-coming-2&email_referrer=email_2989541&email_subject=att-never-saw-it-coming&&

And later on, if you want to join a call to plot further strategy with May Day Strong, head to this link, and join the call (it's at 8 p.m. Eastern Daylight Time tonight, 11/20):  We Choose Workers Over Billionaires this Holiday Season · May Day Strong. 

And if you can't? Well, I'm sure this won't be the last opportunity to make your voice heard on this subject, so feel free to stop in, and look around the neighborhood. Obviously, this isn't going to be a seamless, perfect effort -- Yer Humbler Narrator, for one, does happen to have an AT&T land line, inherited from the previous tenant. That said, I plan to rid myself of it shortly, because it's just gotten too damn expensive, like all of their piracy-minded cohorts.

The actual numbers of AT&T's contracts with the Department of Homeland Security are eye-popping, too (see link below), starting with its recent announcement of a 10-year, $146 million contract to “provide mission-critical communications services that support the agency’s national security and emergency preparedness mission,” which sounds way more pleasant the reality we're seeing on TV every night, of masked goons grabbing people at random, and shoving them into vans, that take them to Trump's growing array of privately-contacted holding pens (which is worth a post in itself).

But the bigger point here is that with revenues approaching $120 billion, AT&T hardly needs to cozy up with Trump's thugs to stay profitable -- if that's actually the reason. In the meantime, everybody can do something, however small, to move the needle -- and finally impose some measure of accountability on the likes of AT&T, and their fellow bad actors, from corporate governance, to pricing, and beyond. Because, suffice to say, people who help to keep a xenophobic deportation machine humming are probably not the types of entities you want to support in the first place. --The Reckoner

Links To Go (Hurry, Hurry,
Before They Scoop Us Off The Sidewalk):

The American Prospect
Chicagoans Grill AT&T For Facilitating ICE Terror:
https://prospect.org/2025/11/17/chicago-ice-att-protest-department-homeland-security/

No Tech For ICE:
https://notechforice.com/
(Essential, for staying up to date on this topic -- a boatload of links and graphics, including a "Take Back Tech" comic, in English and Spanish, summarizing the relevant issues)