As Billy Bob Thornton, Kevin Hart, and Luke Wilson duke it out through dueling television ads over which phone carrier is the best, the telecom giant that claims to be “building what matters” also seems to be supplying federal immigration authorities with some of the tools needed to streamline their data analytics and communications capabilities. Taken together, those tools serve as the technological backbone of federal agencies tasked with border security and immigration enforcement.
AT&T has raked in hundreds of millions of dollars from its contracts with the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) since the early 2000s. Last year, the company inked a ten-year contract worth $146 million to “provide mission-critical communications services that support the agency’s national security and emergency preparedness mission,” a press release explains. (Verizon did the same, though its contract with DHS was valued at $176 million.)
But DHS is a very different animal during Donald Trump’s second term, with Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) and Customs and Border Protection (CBP) conducting an unprecedented campaign of mass detention and deportation. In August, ICE sole-sourced an $11 million contract to AT&T for data analytics and support services. The company also received a $14 million payout from CBP in April for network-related services. Critics say AT&T does not need these rather modest contracts to remain profitable. For the past several quarters, the company’s revenues have consistently hovered around $30 billion, and its annual revenues have yet to fall shy of $120 billion.
“AT&T is enabling and profiting off of the invasion and defunding of our city and state.”
“AT&T is enabling and profiting off of the invasion and defunding of our city and state,” said Will Tanzman, executive director of the People’s Lobby, a Chicago-based community advocacy group. “I think a lot of Chicagoans wouldn’t want to be supporting that.”
The Trump administration has sustained its assault on Chicago over the city’s sanctuary policies, threatening to withhold federal funding and deploying 200 ICE officers as part of Operation Midway Blitz in September. As my colleague Emma Janssen reported, federal immigration authorities have terrorized residents of the Windy City, killing a man in a suburb and firing pepper balls at peaceful protesters; immigration attorneys have struggled to track down their clients; and now, Chicagoans have set their sights on AT&T for “enabling and supporting the level of civil liberties violations and human rights violations that ICE is engaging in,” Tanzman told the Prospect.
The People’s Lobby and ONE People’s Campaign—member organizations of People’s Action, a national network of community activists—recently introduced a petition demanding that AT&T drop its contracts with DHS. In a joint statement, organizers criticized the telecom giant for “choosing to both collect money from customers who are in the crosshairs, and line its pockets with public dollars from DHS and ICE, whose agents are masked, unidentifiable, and operating without warrants as they terrorize members of the public in communities like Chicago.” The petition, which is addressed to AT&T CEO John Stankey, includes a pledge to “not buy or upgrade” the company’s products until it cuts ties with federal law enforcement agencies.
“We also see this as part of a larger strategy,” said Tanzman, an AT&T customer and proud Chicagoan. He expects the grassroots campaigns behind that strategy, which seeks to hold consumer-facing corporations accountable for “enabling and supporting” the Trump administration’s sweeping domestic agenda, to step up their organizing efforts in the near term. On Sunday afternoon, People’s Action organized protests at several AT&T stores throughout Chicago.
“This definitely is the season when a lot of people go out and spend money at retail establishments,” Tanzman told the Prospect. “I think this is a real opportunity for consumers to make some different decisions.”
The groundswell of grassroots organizing against consumer brands that have either supported federal immigration authorities as they ambush and kidnap immigrants at work and school, or done nothing to stop it, seems to be gaining traction. On August 12, organizers in Los Angeles coordinated a nationwide boycott of household names like The Home Depot that they say have been complicit in the federal immigration crackdown, and mobilized to support migrant workers and businesses. For their part, No Tech for ICE and adjacent campaigns have taken direct action to urge cloud service providers like Amazon Web Services to stop fueling Trump’s well-oiled deportation machine.
There is proof of concept here, as well. A similar mass subscription cancellation campaign prompted Disney to reinstate Jimmy Kimmel’s late-night show after he was suspended in an effort to appease the MAGA mob.
The One Big Beautiful Bill Act unlocked unprecedented levels of funding for federal law enforcement agencies, with much of that funding going toward immigration enforcement, and set the table for the largest transfer of wealth to the rich in history. The People’s Lobby has been channeling the unpopularity of looming cuts to health care and food assistance programs into direct action, spending “a lot of this year pushing for the state of Illinois to tax some of the corporations that are benefiting from the big, ugly bill, so that our state can recoup some of that money in order to mitigate the negative impact,” Tanzman said. The economic fallout of that impact seems to be compelling more Americans to take a stand against consumer brands with ties to federal law enforcement agencies, which “are engaging in really reprehensible behavior that is becoming increasingly unpopular,” he told the Prospect.
“As we approach Black Friday, I think any company that has anything to do with ICE or the Trump regime is likely to see some significant backlash from consumers,” Tanzman continued. “People are likely to continue to organize more peaceful protests of those companies.”