GitHub Inc. is facing a backlash from its own employees after insisting it will renew a $200,000 contract with the U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement agency, despite having concerns over some of its policies.

In an open letter sent to The Washington Post, employees from GitHub said that by continuing to work with ICE, the company is being “complicit in widespread human rights abuses.”

The Microsoft Corp.-owned company’s decision to renew the contract was revealed in an internal email that was leaked to the technology activist organization Fight for the Future. GitHub Chief Executive Officer Nat Friedman said the company was simply renewing an enterprise server license. He added that it doesn’t provide any professional services to ICE and that it has no visibility into how its platform is used by the agency.

Friedman noted that both he and the company disagree with a lot of U.S. President Donald Trump’s policies, especially family separation and the Muslim travel ban. However, he said ICE is “a large agency” that also does lots of good work, such as fighting human trafficking. And although GitHub doesn’t know exactly how ICE will use its tools, Friedman said he recognized that it could be used in projects that he both agrees and disagrees with.

The CEO added that it’s important to make a distinction between simply making its software code hosting platform available, as it does with the enterprise server license, and providing professional services.

“We want software developers around the world to have the freedom to operate with a level of privacy,” he wrote. “A world where developers in one country or every country are required to tell us what type of software they are creating would, in our view, undermine the fundamental rights of software developers.”

Friedman also insisted that the $200,000 contract with ICE was “not financially material,” and said the company would donate $500,000 to nonprofit groups that support immigrants affected by Trump’s policies.

But GitHub’s employees remained unconvinced by the gesture.

“We cannot offset human lives with money,” the letter read. “There is no donation that can offset the harm that ICE is perpetrating with the help of our labor. GitHub has held a ‘seat at the table’ for over 2 years, as these illegal and dehumanizing policies have escalated, with little to show for it. Continuing to hold this contract does not improve our bargaining power with ICE.”

This isn’t the first time that technology workers have called on their employers to stop working with ICE. In June 2018, employees of GitHub parent Microsoft protested after it signed a $19.4 million contract with ICE to provide it with data processing and artificial intelligence services. At the time, Microsoft employees said executives were “abdicating” ethical responsibility, but the protest ultimately came to nothing.

Workers at the DevOps company Chef Inc. had better luck in effecting change, although that may have been because it was effectively held hostage by the actions of a rogue, and now former, employee. Last month it caved into pressure and said it would not renew its contract with ICE. But that announcement only came after developer Seth Vargo deleted a vital piece of code for Chef’s own software, causing severe disruption for dozens of its customers.

Constellation Research Inc. analyst Holger Mueller told SiliconANGLE the tribulations technology firms are having with ICE are symptomatic of a larger problem in the software industry, which faces some challenging issues around employee morale. He said that it’s one thing for companies to establish policies not to work with companies that might use their technology for weapons design, for example, but quite another when employees demand that their employers don’t support other kinds of divisive but lawful activities.

“Vendors can’t even quantify the business volume involved in issues such as this, and therefore most are likely to support the continuation of business,” Mueller said. “At the end of the day it comes back to the fact that there often things we don’t like — but have to do them as long as they are legal and lawful.”

Image: GitHub