Microsoft’s ICE tweak

Microsoft scrubbed an online reference to its work for the U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement as the agency faces criticism for its role in separating families at the U.S.-Mexican border.

On Jan. 24, Tom Keane, a Microsoft executive, wrote a blog post about new contracts with the U.S. Air Force and ICE for the company’s Azure cloud-computing service. Keane touted Azure’s ability to help the agency handle “sensitive unclassified data” and use tools such as facial recognition and identification. “The agency is currently implementing transformative technologies for homeland security and public safety, and we’re proud to support this work with our mission-critical cloud,” Keane wrote in the post.

As of Monday morning, the portion of the post mentioning ICE was missing. The earlier, full version of the post was accessed via the Wayback Machine, a historical record of websites maintained by the Internet Archive. On Monday, Bloomberg News asked Microsoft about the work, and the removal of that section of the blog. Soon after, it was back online.

“An employee edited the blog after seeing commentary in social media. This was a mistake and as soon as it was noticed the blog was reverted to previous language,” a Microsoft spokesman said.

Over the weekend, several lawmakers and human rights organizations blasted the White House policy of separating migrant children from their parents at the border. Tech Workers Coalition, an advocacy group, wrote on Twitter that Microsoft employees should decide whether they will “be complicit” in the administration’s immigration policies. Some other tech executives weighed in, too.

Microsoft currently has $19.14 million in active contracts with ICE, according to Bloomberg Government data. Cloudcomputing and software rivals, including Amazon.com, Google and IBM, regularly compete for similar government work. Some of these other companies have been criticized for such activity — in particular Google and a contract with the Pentagon.