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As Amazon Ditches Flock, Protesters Call On It to Go Further and 'Dump' ICE
"Amazon knows that we know now that they are facilitating and profiting from the rise of a supercharged surveillance state that does not respect human rights or the rule of law, and it must end,” one participant said.
Feb 13, 2026
As backlash against Big Tech’s complicity with President Donald Trump’s authoritarian agenda grows, 200 to 250 people gathered on a rainy Seattle afternoon outside Amazon’s headquarters on Friday to demand that the company “dump” its support for Immigration and Customs Enforcement and Customs and Border Protection, which they illustrated by dumping ice onto the grass.
The protest came one day after Amazon-owned Ring announced it would cut ties with law-enforcement tech company Flock Safety, a move that followed public backlash after a Super Bowl ad showcased a “Search Party” feature that activates a network of Ring cameras and uses artificial intelligence for neighborhood surveillance. Ending the partnership with Flock had originally been one of the Seattle protesters’ three demands.
“Our third demand has already been met—which shows that these companies are waking up to how appalled regular people are about the dystopia they're creating for us," organizer Emily Johnston said in a statement.
Johnston said the backlash, as well as nationwide protests against Target’s complicity with ICE and an open letter from Google employees calling on that company to disclose and divest from its dealings with ICE and CBP, meant “it’s clear that we have momentum.”
“We want them to see that partnering with Palantir was a mistake and hosting ICE and CBP on Amazon Web Services was a mistake."
“No one wants surveillance and state violence except those who are profiting from it—and Amazon's thriving depends on both its workers and customers,” Johnston continued. “We have leverage, and we're going to use it."
The protesters on Friday called on Amazon to go further by stopping to host ICE and CBP on Amazon Web Services and ending its partnership with Palantir that also facilitates deportations and surveillance.
“Corporations for years have not only been complicit, but active beneficiaries of the tax money needlessly spent to tear apart immigrant families and communities,” Guadalupe of participating group La Resistencia said in a statement. “Tech plays a bigger role today more than ever in empowering ICE surveillance and its apparatuses of control.”
Eliza Pan, the co-founder of Amazon Employees for Climate Justice (AECJ), told the crowd that Ring dropping the Flock contract was “a big victory for every single person here.”
“We’re adding to that pressure by being here together,” she said. “Amazon knew about this rally, and knows that this is the first of many if they do not end these other partnerships. Amazon knows that we know now that they are facilitating and profiting from the rise of a supercharged surveillance state that does not respect human rights or the rule of law, and it must end.”
The Ring ad featured at the Super Bowl did not mention Flock and showed the Search Party feature being used to find lost dogs, yet viewers and advocates could easily imagine the technology being used in more invasive ways.
“The addition of AI-driven biometric identification is the latest entry in the company’s history of profiting off of public safety worries and disregard for individual privacy, one that turbocharges the extreme dangers of allowing this to carry on,” Beryl Lipton of the Electronic Frontier Foundation said in response to the ad. “People need to reject this kind of disingenuous framing and recognize the potential end result: a scary overreach of the surveillance state designed to catch us all in its net.”
The widely negative response told Amazon that partnering with Flock “was a mistake,” protest organizer Evan Sutton told Common Dreams.
“We want them to see that partnering with Palantir was a mistake and hosting ICE and CBP on Amazon Web Services was a mistake,” he said.
The protest was organized by local tech worker, immigrant justice, and other activist groups including AECJ, No Tech for Apartheid, Defend Immigrants Alliance, La Resistencia, Troublemakers, Washington for All, Seattle Indivisible, Seattle DSA, 350 Seattle, and Southend Indivisible.
The protesters gathered for about an hour to listen to six speakers, including progressive Seattle City Councilmember Alexis Mercedes Rinck. They distributed a flyer to Amazon employees and other passersby with a QR-code link for employees to connect with AECJ.
The demonstration reflects a growing frustration with the Trump-Tech alliance, both nationally and locally.
“We are seeing the American technocrats just full body hug the Trump administration right now, and in the case of Amazon, it’s a company that was born in Seattle, that has made Seattle home, that benefits from all the wonderful things about Seattle and is completely betraying Seattle values by profiting off of the industrial deportation complex and cuddling up to the Trump administration,” Sutton told Common Dreams.
He pointed out that on the night of the day that a CBP agent murdered Alex Pretti, Amazon CEO Andy Jassy attended a private White House premiere for the Melenia movie.
“We have a duty to let these companies know that we won’t stand for it,” he said.
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Seeking Pentagon Contracts, Bezos Rolls Out Red Carpet After Dropping $40 Million on ‘Melania’
"Trump gets paid. Taxpayers get screwed," said one congressman.
Feb 03, 2026
The $40 million film Melania, a biography of the first lady that was purchased by Amazon, has been panned as a "bribe disguised as a documentary," an "expensive propaganda doc," and a "journey into the void."
But despite the reviews, the tech firm has poured an unprecedented $35 million into a marketing campaign for the documentary, and one government watchdog group suggested Monday that the investment by the third-richest person in the world, Amazon founder Jeff Bezos, is already paying off.
Bezos welcomed Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth to his Blue Origin facilities in Florida on Monday as part of Hegseth's "Arsenal of Freedom" speaking tour, which is aimed at overhauling the Pentagon's relationship with defense tech companies.
"Blue Origin is committed to supporting national security to, through, and from space," said Bezos at the event.
Speaking during Secretary of War Pete Hegseth’s “Arsenal of Freedom” tour at Cape Canaveral, Jeff Bezos says U.S. national security now hinges on industrial speed, scale, and space-based capability.
READ MORE: https://t.co/cOUQii31TJ#amazon #jeffbezos #nationalnews #florida pic.twitter.com/uaFGaoMhnI
— KRCR News Channel 7 (@KRCR7) February 3, 2026
Blue Origin, Bezos' space exploration firm, has received billions of dollars in defense contracts to build technology that uses space lasers, nuclear-powered spacecraft, and a processing facility for satellites.
Hegseth said during his tour that Blue Origin is likely to do "plenty of winning" as the Pentagon hands out additional contracts.
Late last month, Amazon Web Services was also awarded a $581 million contract to support the US Air Force's Cloud One program.
Greg Williams, director of the Project on Government Oversight's Center for Defense Information, told USA Today that on its face, Hegseth's visits to Blue Origin as well as SpaceX, the space technology firm owned by Trump administration associate and Republican megadonor Elon Musk, were not "particularly novel."
But considering Bezos' purchase and promotion of the documentary spotlighting President Donald Trump's wife, said Williams, Hegseth's hobnobbing with the tech mogul raises new questions about Bezos' desire to curry favor with the White House.
"By spending a tiny amount of money to buy the rights," said Williams, Bezos "potentially gets a much larger return."
As such, Hegseth's visit to Blue Origin called attention to a situation of "unprecedented conflict of interest," Williams added.
US Rep. Greg Casar (D-Texas) summarized the apparent transaction involving the documentary rights and the government contracts: "Trump gets paid. Taxpayers get screwed."
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'Melania': Of Course It's an Outright $75 Million Bribe
If America still had a Department of Justice, Jeff Bezos would be indicted for bribery of a public official pursuant to 18 U.S. Code § 201, which criminalizes offering or giving anything of value to a public official with the intent to influence their official actions.
Feb 02, 2026
I haven’t seen it. I hope you don’t, either.
This, from one of the kinder reviews:
“Across some 104 minutes, the first lady delivers these blatantly scripted and meaningless narrations with all the conviction of someone who just woke up from a two-hour nap and can’t remember what day it is.”
Manohla Dargis of The New York Times sees a “glossy, curiously impersonal” portrait of a woman who “rarely drops her Sphinxlike deadpan.” Nick Hilton of The Independent calls the first lady a “scowling void of pure nothingness in this ghastly bit of propaganda.” Guardian critic Xan Brooks says it “doesn’t have a single redeeming quality” and compares it to a “medieval tribute to placate the greedy king on his throne.”
Not since The Washington Post music critic Paul Hume observed that Margaret Truman’s singing voice in Constitution Hall in 1950 was “flat a good deal of the time” has a performance by a member of a sitting president’s family generated such averse reviews.
Yet because the The Washington Post is now owned by the man who spent $75 million on the movie ($40 million to make it, $35 million to promote it), I somehow doubt The Post will crap on it. (At least Monica Hesse, in her review for The Post, had the honesty to confess that “if you suspect I have come here today to trash a movie about the wife of a notoriously thin-skinned, anti-journalist president, which was bankrolled by the company owned by the man who also pays my salary—NOT TODAY, SATAN. Do you think I’m a moron?”)
My purpose today is less to highlight this inane excuse for a film than to talk about its real excuse—allowing Jeff Bezos to give a big fat bribe to the president of the United States.
Why would Bezos bribe him? Please.
Bezos, one of the richest men in the world, owns Amazon and many other businesses that depend on the whims of the sociopath in the Oval Office. (Trump sold the idea of the documentary to Bezos when he dined at Mar-a-Lago in December 2024, just after the election, according to the The Wall Street Journal.)
Bezos’s Amazon Web Services has a $1 billion agreement with the General Services Administration for cloud services, which presumably Bezos would like renewed. His rocket company, Blue Origin, has over $2.3 billion in contracts from the U.S. Space Force.
Several of Bezos’s companies are subject to potential tariffs on goods from China. Amazon is under the cloud of a major antitrust lawsuit brought by the Federal Trade Commission (when the FTC was still independent—before it came under the putative control of the Oval Office). The trial is expected in 2027.
And so on.
Friends, when the history of this sordid period of America is written—assuming it’s not written by historians trying to curry favor with a future fascist regime—I hope the leaders of American business are condemned to the hellfire they deserve for helping destroy American democracy.
The outer ring of hell will be reserved for CEOs who stayed silent so as not to rile the narcissist-in-chief.
Jamie Dimon of JPMorgan Chase will reside here because, notwithstanding his assumed role as spokesman for American business, Dimon has uttered no criticism of Trump other than to suggest, in the vaguest possible terms, that Trump’s attack on the Federal Reserve’s independence “is probably not a great idea.”
The middle ring will be reserved for business leaders who surrendered to Trump’s extortionist demands for personal payoffs.
The Ellisons, père Larry (the world’s third-richest person) et fils David, will be there, along with Shari Redstone and the board of Paramount, for paying Trump $16 million to settle his utterly baseless lawsuit against CBS.
Also in this middle ring will be Bob Iger, CEO of Disney (which owns ABC) and Debra OConnell, the president of ABC News Group and Disney Entertainment Networks, for giving Trump $15 million to settle his equally spurious lawsuit against ABC News.
In the inner ring, where hell fires burn especially hot, will be business leaders who went beyond acquiescing to Trump’s extortion and decided to pay him big fat bribes.
Elon Musk, the world’s richest man, will have pride of place here, after spending a quarter of a billion dollars getting Trump elected.
Tim Cook, CEO of Apple, will get a spot here for lavishing on Trump a custom-designed glass plaque mounted on a 24-karat gold base.
We’ll also find here the CEOs who coughed up $300,000 each for Trump’s ballroom — including crypto magnates Cameron and Tyler Winklevoss, oil tycoon Harold Hamm, Blackstone’s Stephen Schwarzman, and every Big Tech mogul.
But Jeff Bezos, with his $75 million bribe of Trump, will deserve a special place in the innermost ring of hell.
The $40 million he paid Melania Trump’s production company is at least $35 million more than the cost of typical high-end documentaries. (By way of comparison, Magnolia Pictures and CNN Films produced “RBG,” a documentary about the late Supreme Court justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg, for around $1 million.)
Melania Trump pocketed more than 70 percent of that $40 million—or more than $28 million—the Journal reported.
The additional $35 million Bezos shelled out for marketing “Melania” is 10 times what other high-profile documentaries spend on marketing. The promotional budget for “RBG” was about $3 million. (To be sure, Melania Trump is no Ruth Bader Ginsburg, so I suppose you might argue that Melania needed a larger promo budget. But this much larger?)
All this, at a time when Bezos is slashing the newsroom at the Post—it’s heart and soul—in order to “economize.” Forget the inner ring. Bezos deserves to be at the center of the inferno.
The promo money apparently worked, at least in the U.S., where opening-weekend ticket sales for “Melania” totaled $7 million.
But let’s be realistic. A $35 million promotional budget will get people into theaters to see paint drying.
If all goes well—given that opening weekend is usually about 25 percent of total box office and that movie houses pocket half — Amazon could end up with about $14 million on its $75 million investment. A pittance.
Yet this was never a financial investment. It was an investment in kissing Trump’s derriere. As Ted Hope, who was instrumental in starting Amazon’s film division, wondered aloud to The New York Times: “How can it not be equated with currying favor or an outright bribe? How can that not be the case?”
Of course it’s an outright bribe.
If America still had a Department of Justice, Bezos would be indicted for bribery of a public official pursuant to 18 U.S. Code § 201, which criminalizes offering or giving anything of value to a public official with the intent to influence their official actions. Penalty: imprisonment for up to 15 years.
(Also note: TheU.S. Constitution lists taking a bribe as an impeachable offense for a president.)
There’s a statute of limitations for criminal prosecution of such bribes: Prosecution must begin within five years of the deed.
So, my friends, if America gets a true Justice Department starting in January of 2029, Bezos’s inferno may become a reality.
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