I'm no fan of ICE – a very large percentage of my friends in the US are immigrants, and I generally want my country to be a welcoming one. ICE has certainly committed unethical and probably illegal acts (probably true of most federal agencies).
But to expect that a _federal agency_ will be denied service from a private entity, especially for essentially political reasons, is lunacy. It'd attract extreme negative attention from the rest of the government, and great fear from all paying customers that an internet mob could separate them from their code at any time.
We should absolutely be lobbying hard for changes to immigration law, the restrictions placed on ICE, and justice for their wrongdoings.
But I can't see how this helps improve immigration, and it certainly seems likely to cause a lot of negative consequences for GitHub. The employees are putting their employer in a "damned if they do, damned if they don't" situation.
EDIT: Just to clarify, I love the vision of a world where executives don't take actions their workers will protest. I think that in order to get there, the protests need to be reasonable, and I think this one isn't.
EDIT DISCLAIMER: I own a small amount of MSFT stock, which was not on my mind as I wrote this. I use GitHub's free service and have no other relationship I can think of with MSFT or GitHub.
And before anyone invokes Godwin's Law, ICE has been recently discovered to have literally poisoned detainees by using toxic cleaning chemicals in close proximity to detainees without giving them any protection or sufficient ventilation[2].
But even if you think it is unreasonable or overblown to call ICE nazis or fascists, I still question the premise that companies should not be held morally responsible for the people they knowingly and willingly do business with. If GitHub was selling software to known terrorists, you'd better believe that the American government (and hopefully most people) wouldn't see it as being fair game.
I agree that the lasting way to stop the abuses by ICE is through legislative and administrative changes, but I disagree with the argument that "refusing to sell software to ICE won't stop them from committing abuses, so I'll just sell them software anyway" is ethically justified. Now, GitHub is obviously free to do whatever they like but the public should also be free to point this out whenever they try to take the moral high ground.
[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IBM_and_the_Holocaust [2]: https://thecrimereport.org/2020/06/11/ice-spraying-disinfect...
One particular facet in the discussion that stuck with me more than the rest was a comment by a co-worker who was visiting from the Berlin office.
They talked briefly about small monuments on the street by their home marking the spots where people were arrested and taken to concentration camps as their time and place of death. They pointed out that in many cases those dates are in the mid 1930s. Up to 10 years before the discovery and liberation of the death camps.
Calling ICE nazis (while still hopefully hyperbole) is not necessarily an unfounded comparison.
There are tens of thousands of them now, every one of them installed by the artist who originally came up with the idea.
They are installed in front of their last place of residence. So it's really decentralised, and the realisation that the Holocaust happened in your street (or even to people living in the house you now life in) is powerful.