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Which major corporations publicly announced ending contracts or services with ICE and in what year did they act?
Executive Summary
Major corporations have had mixed responses to calls to cut ties with U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE): a small number publicly ended contracts or services — most notably some consulting and public-relations firms — while tech giants faced employee pressure but often did not sever relationships. Reported terminations and reviews occurred primarily between 2018 and 2022, but the record is uneven and sometimes clarified by companies as routine contract expirations rather than voluntary cancellations.
1. The handful of firms that publicly moved to end ties — who and when this happened
A limited set of companies publicly announced they would stop work tied to ICE or similar immigration-enforcement contracts, with press coverage surfacing most prominently in 2018–2019. McKinsey & Company, Edelman and Chef are cited as having ended engagements referenced in contemporary reporting of employee activism and corporate responses during that period [1]. One national utility group reportedly stopped supplying data to Clear in December (reported in later summaries), reflecting a concrete operational cutoff [2]. Several of these actions were reported in 2019 coverage of “cubicle activism,” which tracked worker-driven campaigns that led to contract terminations or nonrenewals across several service providers and consultancies [1] [3].
2. When “ending” actually meant “contract expired” — corporate clarifications and nuance
Some widely circulated accounts of contracts being “ended” were clarified by companies as scheduled expirations or nonrenewals rather than a decision prompted solely by public pressure. For example, McKinsey was reported as having terminated a consulting contract worth roughly $20 million, but the firm later characterized the engagement as having ended on its scheduled timeline, complicating claims that it was a direct response to activism [3]. This pattern appears repeatedly in reporting: public activism and negative publicity coincided with contract conclusions, yet corporate statements sometimes framed the cessation as routine business, introducing ambiguity about motive and timing [3] [1].
3. Tech giants faced sustained employee protests but rarely cut ties outright
Large technology companies drew sustained internal pressure — employees at Microsoft, Amazon, Salesforce, Google and others publicly demanded an end to work supporting ICE or Customs and Border Protection — but most did not formally announce contract terminations in the documented coverage. Microsoft employees protested a contract reported in 2019, while Amazon and Salesforce employees similarly pressured leadership; however, follow-up reporting shows that these companies resisted broad public claims of divestment, framing some contracts as limited in scope or maintaining that relationships had not been severed [3] [1]. The protests spurred visibility and corporate reviews but did not uniformly result in public contract cancellations.
4. Ongoing reviews and active contracts as of mid‑2025 — the opposite picture
By mid‑2025, reporting and contract inventories painted a different picture: many large firms still had active contracts with ICE, and some corporations were conducting reviews rather than terminating engagements. Fortune and Reuters-era summaries list numerous Fortune 500 firms maintaining active contracts with ICE as of June 2025, even as shareholder groups and unions pushed for human-rights risk assessments; Thomson Reuters, for example, announced a review of its ICE-related data contracts in 2022 but had not publicly ended all such relationships [4] [2]. This indicates that headline-grabbing departures in earlier years did not translate into industrywide divestment, and that the roster of contractors remained substantial into 2025.
5. Competing narratives, activist strategies and what’s missing in the public record
Two competing narratives emerge from recent coverage: activists and some outlets highlight concrete wins where vendors cut ties or ceased services, while corporate statements often emphasize contractual timelines or limited scopes to downplay causation. Petitions and shareholder actions — for instance calls on AT&T to end contracts — demonstrate ongoing pressure but do not always produce announced contract terminations [5]. The public record lacks a comprehensive, timestamped ledger of which firms formally terminated contracts and the precise legal mechanism (cancellation, nonrenewal, expiration) used. This gap means claims about “which major corporations publicly announced ending contracts” must be treated as partial: specific firms did announce or were reported to have ended engagements primarily around 2018–2019, while many large contractors remained active or under review through 2022–2025 [3] [1] [4].