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'Make Corporate Complicity Unprofitable': Boycott Targets Companies Tied to ICE
"We cannot out-organize a fascist administration while simultaneously bankrolling the companies profiting from its cruelty," said the head of Beyond the Ballot.
Nov 25, 2025
A Gen Z-led advocacy group fighting for working-class priorities on Tuesday announced a boycott campaign targeting major corporations "that enable, profit from, or directly collaborate with Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) and the broader racist policies of the Trump administration."
Beyond the Ballot launched "Not With My Dollars: ICE Out of My Wallet" as President Donald Trump's violent crackdown on immigrants in diverse communities across the United States continues and just days before Black Friday kicks off the winter holiday shopping season.
"We cannot out-organize a fascist administration while simultaneously bankrolling the companies profiting from its cruelty," said Victor Rivera, the organization's executive director, in a statement. "Every dollar spent at a complicit corporation is a dollar funding the abduction and disappearance of our neighbors. It’' time to make corporate complicity unprofitable, for good."
The group is taking aim at e-commerce behemoth Amazon and its grocery subsidiary, Whole Foods; tech giants Dell and Microsoft; Home Depot; streaming platform Spotify; and retail chain Target. The boycott webpage explains the reason each is listed, actions shoppers should take, and the campaign's demands. In some cases, it also offers alternative companies.
Target is under fire for its "broad range of cooperation with the Trump administration's racist policies." The campaign is calling on the company to not only publicly commit to refusing collaboration with ICE but also immediately reinstate its scrapped diversity, equity, and inclusion policies.
Spotify is on the list for airing ICE recruitment ads—a decision that also recently prompted a boycott call from the group Indivisible.
The campaign site calls out Home Depot because it has "repeatedly allowed ICE agents to patrol and detain workers and customers in its parking lots and stores, usually without presenting judicial warrants or establishing probable cause," and demands an end to those practices.
The group is urging Microsoft to end its "$19.4 million contract with ICE to provide artificial intelligence capabilities and processing data." The Dell section highlights that it has provided $18.8 million to "support the office of ICE's chief information officer through the purchase of Microsoft enterprise software licenses," and similarly calls for terminating that contract with the US Department of Homeland Security (DHS).
The Amazon section states:
REASON: Amazon Web Services (AWS) is the digital backbone of ICE's machinery, selling the cloud power that helps track, target, and tear families apart.
ACTION: Stop shopping on Amazon where possible; cancel Prime subscriptions if feasible; push universities, unions, nonprofits, and campaigns to move off AWS when and where feasible, and to issue statements condemning Amazon’s role in corporate-sponsored mass deportations.
DEMAND: End all ICE/DHS immigration enforcement contracts and data hosting that enable deportations; adopt a binding human-rights policy banning support for immigration policing.
ALTERNATIVES: Bookshop.org and local bookstores; direct-from-brand purchasing; cooperatives; independent retailers.
The site also stresses that "every dollar spent at Whole Foods directly strengthens Amazon, whose AWS platform is the digital backbone of ICE's machinery, powering the tools used to track, target, and tear families apart."
While the campaign is beginning just before Black Friday, boycott organizers aim to ensure it will "not disappear" after this week.
"Unlike other consumer boycotts, Not With My Dollars is designed for long-term pressure and escalation," Beyond the Ballot said. "To be removed from the boycott list, each targeted corporation must fulfill the specific demands outlined for its company. Anything less is not accountability, just more corporate PR."
"If you bankroll a violent, unaccountable agency that terrorizes our communities, you will not do it with our money," the group added. "Across the country, poor and working-class migrant families are facing a wave of state-sponsored abductions, violence, and political policing under the fascist Trump administration. Corporations that choose to partner with, advertise on, bankroll, or provide critical infrastructure to ICE are not neutral; they are complicit."
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Cloudflare Outage Ruin Your Morning? Consumer Groups Say Blame Profit-Hungry Big Tech Monopolists
"Congress and regulators must finally step in and crack down on anticompetitive behavior, opening markets, requiring interoperability, and ensuring smaller tech firms can compete," said one advocate.
Nov 18, 2025
Just weeks after major Amazon Web Services and Microsoft Azure outages, Cloudflare on Tuesday became the latest company to "break the internet," prompting consumer watchdogs to take aim at Big Tech and call out industry consolidation.
"This outage is another brutal reminder that the internet is far too dependent on a tiny handful of tech giants," said Public Citizen's Big Tech accountability advocate, J.B. Branch, in a statement. "For years, industry lobbyists have insisted that deregulation would spark innovation from smaller companies. Instead, we got the opposite: mass consolidation of data, compute, and infrastructure into the hands of a few dominant firms whose failures now cascade across the globe."
"Governments and companies continuing to contract with the same handful of companies are increasing the fragility of both the internet and entire economies," Branch continued. "Congress and regulators must finally step in and crack down on anticompetitive behavior, opening markets, requiring interoperability, and ensuring smaller tech firms can compete so the entire digital economy isn't held hostage by the failures of a few dominant companies."
After Amazon's outage last month, Public Citizen and other groups—including the American Economic Liberties Project, Demand Progress Education Fund, and Tech Oversight Project—called on Federal Trade Commission Chair Andrew Ferguson "to swiftly conduct a market structure review of leading cloud services providers, including but not limited to Amazon, to assess how their market dominance and use of monopoly power to stifle competition is creating systemic fragility across industries."
"Big Tech is clearly creating systemic dangers that warrant proactive oversight and aggressive intervention by the FTC, on behalf of the American people and as soon as possible."
"This probe should also examine dependencies of key sectors (such as financial services, telecommunications, and government services) on any single cloud provider and the extent to which those dependencies pose systemic risks to data security and privacy and consumer protection, as well as to our open markets and the resilience of our national and global infrastructure systems," the coalition argued. "We urge you to then take robust agency action to counter these systemic dangers, particularly to bring diversification to the cloud industry."
"Given the enormous stakes, the FTC should not defer action until the next crisis—the FTC has the mandate, the requisite knowledge, and the legal authorities to tackle this challenge now," the coalition concluded. "Big Tech is clearly creating systemic dangers that warrant proactive oversight and aggressive intervention by the FTC, on behalf of the American people and as soon as possible."
Just a few weeks later, the Cloudflare outage on Tuesday impacted websites including ChatGPT, Coinbase, Dropbox, X, Shopify, Spotify, Zoom, the Moody credit ratings service, and many more. According to Cloudflare, the San Francisco-based company offers over 60 cloud services globally, and it protects "20% of all websites."
In a statement to Forbes, a company spokesperson said that "the root cause of the outage was a configuration file that is automatically generated to manage threat traffic. The file grew beyond an expected size of entries and triggered a crash in the software system that handles traffic for a number of Cloudflare’s services."
Stressing that there is "no evidence that this was the result of an attack or caused by malicious activity," the spokesperson added that "we expect that some Cloudflare services will be briefly degraded as traffic naturally spikes post incident but we expect all services to return to normal in the next few hours."
Cloudflare also said on X—which is now working again—that "we always strive to be as transparent as possible in these types of situations, and we will be publishing an in-depth blog shortly."
Meanwhile, Demand Progress Education Fund highlighted the coalition's recent letter to the FTC, and Emily Peterson-Cassin, the group's policy director, said that "yet again, a failure at one company disrupted the lives of people all around the globe."
"Big Tech's relentless drive to become the only fish in the pond and centralize the internet in their hands threatens our economy and our national security," she added. "The FTC has the knowledge and the power to help prevent this from happening again. For all our sakes, the agency must take action immediately."
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Report Details Massive Federal Contracts, Enforcement Actions Against Trump's Ballroom Donors
"These are not random donations," said Public Citizen. "It's a clear-as-day effort to kiss up to the Trump administration."
Nov 03, 2025
As President Donald Trump has embarked on the $300 million demolition of the East Wing of the White House—a project he insists has been "longed for" for more than a century—he has openly said that he and "some of [his] friends" are paying for the ballroom he is building.
But an analysis on Monday detailed just how "massive, inescapable, and irremediable" the donors' conflicts of interest are, as more than a dozen of the presidents' "friends" have major government contracts and are facing federal enforcement actions.
The White House has denied that corporate donors to Trump's ballroom construction project have any conflicts of interest, but Public Citizen found that 16 out of 24 publicly disclosed contributors—including three identified by CBS News but not by the White House—have government contracts.
The companies, including Amazon, Google, Lockheed Martin, and Palantir Technologies, have received $279 billion in government contracts over the last five years and nearly $43 billion in the last year. Lockheed is by far the biggest recipient, having received $191 billion in defense contracts over the last five years. The amount the companies have each donated to the ballroom construction has not been disclosed, but Lockheed spent more than $76 million in political donations from 2021-25.
The money the corporations have spent to build Trump's ballroom, said Public Citizen, "are not random donations. It's a clear-as-day effort to kiss up to the Trump administration."
Lockheed is among at least 14 ballroom contributors that are facing federal enforcement actions, including labor rights cases, Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) enforcement, and antitrust actions.
The National Labor Relations Board has before it cases alleging unfair labor practices by Lockheed as well as Google and Amazon.
The big tech firm Nvidia, another donor, has previously been accused of entering into a "quid pro quo" arrangement with the White House when it said it would give 15% of its revenue from exports to China directly to the Trump administration. The company has spent more than $6 million on political donations since 2021 and more than $4 million on lobbying, and faces a Department of Justice antitrust investigation into whether it abused its market dominance in artificial intelligence computer chips.
While Trump has sought to portray the ballroom fundraising drive as one in which his wealthy "friends" have simply joined the effort to beautify a cherished public building, Public Citizen co-president Robert Weissman said the companies are not acting "out of a sense of civic pride."
"They have massive interests before the federal government and they undoubtedly hope to curry favor with, and receive favorable treatment from, the Trump administration," said Weissman. "Millions to fund Trump’s architectural whims are nothing compared to the billions at stake in procurement, regulatory, and enforcement decisions."
In total, the 24 companies identified as ballroom donors spent more than $960 million in lobbying and political contributions in the last election cycle and $1.6 billion over the last five years.
Weissman said the companies' contributions to the president's pet project amount to corporate America "paying tribute" to the White House in order to stave off unfavorable labor rights and antitrust rulings, energy and financial regulations, and SEC actions and oversight, like an investigation into the cryptocurrency firm Gemini over alleged sales of unregistered securities.
"This is more than everyday corporate influence seeking. Paying tribute is a mark of authoritarianism and in making these payments, these corporations are aiding Trump’s authoritarian project," said Weissman. "They should withdraw their contributions.”
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