ICE Relies On Hundreds Of Companies. A Texas Mom Is Making Sure We Know Exactly Who They Are.

Filed 1h ago · Via HuffPost · The Buffoon Desk

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Kevin MacLeod · incompetech.com · CC BY 4.0

Photo: Roland zh · CC BY-SA 3.0 · via Wikimedia Commons

Laura Berlin, a Texas mom with a nonprofit communications background, built an interactive Google Map called 'Who's Profiting from ICE?' cataloguing hundreds of companies with ties to the agency's operations, from Spotify's since-ended recruitment ads to a New Mexico fingerprint-scanner supplier. She says the information comes mostly from public government databases, with occasional outreach to companies before adding a listing based on an unverified tip.

A February government intelligence bulletin labeled the site a tool for domestic terrorism. The map has already coincided with concrete outcomes: Prairie Band Potawatomi Nation leaders fired executives and ended a tribally owned company's ICE-related contract after community backlash, and workers at architecture firm DLR pushed the company away from an ICE detention project.

Berlin says an informed public threatens the agency's agenda, and that the goal is simply letting people make informed choices, including boycotts.

The full dispatch is available from the source below.

✒ FROM THE EDITORIAL DESK

Calling a spreadsheet of public records a terrorism risk is the kind of overreaction that tells you more about the people doing the labeling than the woman doing the mapping. If the information was already sitting in government databases anyone could search, the problem was never secrecy, it was that somebody finally organized it into one place people could actually look at. A tribe firing its own executives over a contract they didn't like is democracy working exactly the way it's supposed to, terrorism bulletin or not.

Source: Read the original at HuffPost → Scored: Sneaky · Kevin MacLeod · CC BY 4.0

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