NOMAD, NY — Dozens of immigrant-rights activists showed up to Jeff Bezos’s Manhattan apartment building primed for a fight Monday as they demanded Amazon cut ties with federal immigration authorities.
About five protesters went into the lobby of 212 Fifth Ave. — where Bezos reportedly paid about $80 million for three units last month — to deliver more than 270,000 petitions calling on Amazon to end its relationship with U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement.
Protesters crammed onto the sidewalk outside the building’s entrance on West 26th Street charged that the behemoth firm Bezos leads as CEO is complicit in ICE’s crackdown on undocumented immigrants because its technology supports the agency’s enforcement operations.
“When ICE comes to our homes, when ICE comes to our workplaces and detains our brothers and sisters, when they take away our family members, there’s no doorman there,” Anshu Khadka, an activist with Desis Rising Up and Moving, said through a bullhorn outside the luxury condo building.
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The protest was one of several across the country decrying Amazon to mark the start of Prime Day, the company’s annual blowout sale, amid the threat of nationwide ICE raids on immigrant families.
Immigrant-rights activists have criticized Amazon Web Services, Amazon’s cloud-computing subsidiary, for using servers to host Palantir, the technology company that designed ICE’s case management system.
The relationship between Amazon and Palantir forms “the backbone for the federal government’s immigration and law enforcement dragnet,” according to the activist group Mijente. Amazon also reportedly allows police agencies to buy its facial-recognition technology, Rekognition, despite concerns from its own employees.
“They have figured out how to not only exploit workers, not pay taxes themselves, but take our money to be able to create the infrastructure that ICE needs to do the raids that they are threatening to do this week,” Mijente field director Jacinta Gonzalez said.
The protest came days after activists interrupted the Amazon Web Services Summit at the Javits Center over concerns about the company’s ties to ICE.
It’s uncertain whether Bezos was in the penthouse he reportedly purchased at the building when protesters descended on it Monday. Amazon did not immediately respond to a request for comment on the rally.
But a spokesperson for Amazon Web Services told The Washington Post last week that the government and private firms should use technology “responsibly and lawfully.”
“There is clearly a need for more clarity from governments on what is acceptable use of AI and ramifications for its misuse, and we’ve provided a proposed legislative framework for this,” the spokesperson told the paper in a statement. “We remain eager for the government to provide this additional clarity and legislation, and will continue to offer our ideas and specific suggestions.”