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.
They have a problem with their employer, and are being heard in the court of public opinion. Why is that "a bummer"?
I don't have a particular opinion on whether or not what they are doing is an effective way to accomplish their aims. But workers speaking out for any reason, ranging from unethical wage suppression to insufficient toilet breaks to disagreement with company policy, should always be cause for rejoicing.
Employers in the US hold a wildly disparate amount of power (with health insurance being tied to employment, and no social safety net) – so employees that speak out tend to help tilt that balance a very tiny bit back to the side of the employee.
The court of public opinion doesn't have a good track record, for one. It's decisions are often based on fashion more than any kind of ethical principles.
A classic exploration of this phenomenon is contained in the novel The Bonfire of the Vanities by Tom Wolfe.
The most common cases involve people who did something bad, but where the punishment meted out was totally disproportional to the crime itself.
Justine Sacco is the classic case, who made a bad joke and had her life turned upside down.
Then you have the cases where people are so full of emotion that they get basic facts wrong.
James Damore is a good example of this, who many media outlets falsely claimed had written in his infamous memo that women were inferior to men in terms of software engineering ability.
Just go on twitter or facebook and take a look at how issues are being discussed. Even here on hacker news it's sometimes difficult to have sense making discussions because people are in such a rush to judgement.
It’s called a dog whistle. Damore knew exactly what he was saying, who it would appeal to, and how to attempt to cover himself when the whole thing blew up in his face.