It may feel better to watch and yell from the outside, and you may have the moral high ground in doing so. But change happens from the inside. We need more companies like GitHub working with agencies to reform their policies.
Also, change is slow. Protests are step one, but there are probably 235 more steps until change is realized. Slow and steady, my friends.
EDIT: To answer the questions about how a company influences policy. Companies influence policy all. the. time. Look at ALEC[1] look at PACs. Look at the fact that Microsoft is not going to be offering facial recognition tech until privacy protections are passed. Not saying ALEC is good, but it exists.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/American_Legislative_Exchange_...
On the other hand, employees of ICE, who are actually inside do probably have some (admittedly limited) amount of leverage. It might by that if they are frustrated at losing access to tools that they previously thought worth paying for, they would attempt to exert that leverage for change.
Companies _can_ influence policy. Look at Microsoft saying they won't offer facial recognition until laws are passed.
And people wonder why there is a military industrial complex.
There's about a 0% chance that a government agency would change anything about their policies based on what GitHub employees say. Companies that work on government contracts get "report cards" detailing the agency's satisfaction with their performance, and any other government agency can view the reports for that company, so it's in their best interest to try and get favorable reviews by doing what the agency wants.
"Hey, you see this part of the code where you sort through the parents, to separate them from their children? Maybe don't do that?"
ICE is going to ignore any unprofessional suggestions, that's not what they hired GitHub to do.
In fact the usual argument employers give when you don't do exactly they hired you to do - "that's not what we hired you for" - is pretty strong. And unless GitHub sabotages their own work (which they won't), then their work will simply be in service to ICE's goals. There's no room left over for contributing non-work opinions.
In general, if the idea is that a tool makes you more efficient/effective, denying that tool does the opposite. Making ICE less effective seems laudable, so why not throw roadblocks, even small ones, in the way?
If we stop ICE from using these tools, are you saying that sex trafficking victims are less worthy of help than detained immigrants? How do you draw that line?
There's 3 times more slaves today than during the period of the transatlantic slave trade. Estimated to be 40m people, 10m of which are children, mainly in Africa and Asia.[0]
[0] https://www.theguardian.com/news/2019/feb/25/modern-slavery-...
> I want ICE to have every tool at their disposal to fight sex trafficking.
I want a different organization to fight sex trafficking. If it's an important enough issue, it can be split from the organization that imprisons children, which is....not too far from what you're lauding ICE from preventing.