Architecture Firm to Stop Designing ICE Prisons After Staff Outrage

DLR Group, one of the world’s largest architecture firms, is facing severe backlash from employees after it was found out that the firm had a contract to convert a Louisiana private prison into an immigration detention center.

As Madison Pauly explains in an article in Mother Jones, the outcry over the ICE contract “has thrown DLR Group into turmoil, according to interviews with three current employees—all of whom requested anonymity for fear of retaliation—as well as a review of posts on the firm’s internal message board and a recording of a mid-February call between executives and hundreds of workers, provided by an anonymous employee.”

Although a spokesperson denied that there had been any “unrest” at the firm, its CEO announced in February that “DLR Group will not do work—be it upgrades, modernization, or new construction—for ICE detainment or deportation facilities.” However, the firm will not end its existing contract or commit to ending its relationship with other private prisons. 

According to Pauly, DLR isn’t the only company facing backlash. “Since the surge of ICE enforcement in Minneapolis, more than two thousand tech workers at companies like Amazon and Microsoft have petitioned their White House-cozying CEOs to cancel ICE contracts, to no avail,” for example. 

DLR Group makes no bones about its involvement in incarceration. In fact, it was recently ranked the country’s top “justice facility” architecture firm. After the ICE contract fiasco, its CEO “apologized for the strain employees had gone through,” but said “Now every individual must make their own decision as to whether they’re committed to work that the firm holistically does.”