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.
Um, think you've got this backwards. Private entities shouldn't have to take on anyone they don't want as customers (for whatever reason - do you have to justify who you do or don't want in your livingroom?), but publicly-funded institutions shouldn't be able to deny service on political grounds.
It's still politically dangerous, and would earn a company a lot of enemies and mistrust (as well as some allies, though they may be the type to just ask for more, as others on this post have mentioned).
Yes, doing the right thing often is dangerous and earns you hatred from other people doing bad things who love the freedom of hiding amongst a herd of other equally guilty people.
The reason we have so much respect for people who take stand and do what they believe is right is because doing so is so hard. That doesn't mean you shouldn't do it.
Denying the use of racially biased facial recognition software is a much clearer example where the risks are lower and the impact much, much greater.
It's much less clear that a source code repository is the fulcrum that enables 40 children to be jammed into a room without hygiene. Maybe if you worked for a critical supplier for ICE you could have an impact (which I would much encourage).
I fundamentally disagree with this. Your argument is akin to stating that there should never be any casualties in a war. There is no way to effectively win a war without sometimes sending some troops into situations where you know they will die.
Compared to soldiers who knowingly lay down their lives in losing battles to help win the war, choosing a moral course of action that merely ends a company seems like a pretty cheap sacrifice.