The French IT giant Capgemini has put its US subsidiary on sale because of its association with the work of ICE in America.
All hell broke loose last week in France after it was revealed by the state broadcaster that Capgemini’s software was being used by Immigration and Customs Enforcement to identify foreigners on US soil and track their locations. According to the BBC, Capgemini multi-million dollar contract with ICE was agreed last December and was scheduled to run until 15 March.
It has now been curtailed after the company found itself in the eye of a storm following the deaths last month of two anti-ICE protestors in separate incidents in Minneapolis. Union leaders in France demanded an “immediate and public cessation of any collaboration with ICE.” The hard-left la France Insoumise party tabled a bill in parliament calling on the government to publicly condemn what it described as human rights violations. One of its MPs, Hadrien Clouet, called ICE “a supremacist militia disguised as a federal immigration service” and urged the Republic to “to assume its responsibilities.”
The Communist senator Ian Brossat declared: “Can France accept that a French company is participating, abroad, in the hunting down, detention and murder of innocent people?” To which the Minister Delegate for Industry, Sébastien Martin, agreed, saying that “a global company based in France cannot shirk its ethical and social responsibility in the choice of its partners.”
Announcing its decision to put its US subsidiary up for sale, Capgemini said that they had not been able to “exercise appropriate control over certain aspects of the operations of this subsidiary.”
Capgemini will survive the loss of its ICE contract. This is a company whose revenue exceeded $25.9 billion in 2024, and which employs 420,000 people in more than fifty countries.
No country has an ethical foreign policy but few are as hypocritical as France in pretending they do
Among its other international partners are Egypt and Morocco. The latter is frequently criticised by human rights organizations for its treatment of sub-Saharan migrants. In 2022 it was reported that 18 migrants and asylum seekers were killed and dozens injured “after Moroccan security forces used excessive force against them.” The migrants had been attempting to cross the border into the Spanish city of Melilla.
Egypt’s brutality is carried out against its own citizens, as detailed in a report published in 2025 by Human Rights Watch. President Abdel al-Sisi’s government has for more than a decade perpetrated “wholesale repression, systematically detaining and punishing peaceful critics and activists and effectively criminalizing peaceful dissent.” It cited as an example the political satire artist Ashraf Omar. His family alleged that the police had “tortured him and threatened to subject him to electric shocks while in secret detention.”
Capgemini bears no responsibility for the actions of authoritarian regimes such as al-Sisi’s, but what about the French government? If Paris is so appalled by the activities of ICE, pressurizing Capgemini to sever its contract in the name of “ethical and social responsibility,” then why does it continue to export arms to a repressive regime such as Egypt?
Last December France shipped three of its Rafale fighter jets to Egypt, part of a €3.75 billion ($4.4 billion) deal signed between the two countries in 2021 for a total of 30 aircraft. That was the same year four Egyptian security officers were tried in absentia in a Rome court for the torture and murder of Giulio Regeni, an Italian Cambridge University PhD student. The men were tried in absentia because the Egyptian authorities refused to co-operate.
The morally responsible French government also does a roaring trade in exporting arms to Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates. In 2020 the European Center for Constitutional and Human Rights published a report entitled “Made in Europe, bombed in Yemen.” It described how several European countries had supplied weapons to Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates a decade ago for deployment in the Yemen. The report listed scores of indiscriminate attacks on civilian homes, markets, hospitals, schools and cultural heritage sites. Used in these attacks were aircraft, bombs and target finders manufactured by French companies.
No country has an ethical foreign policy but few are as hypocritical as France in pretending they do. One suspects that the Republic has only made such a fuss about Capgemini because it is indirectly working for Donald Trump.
Since November 2024 the Paris elite has been suffering from a nasty case of Trump Derangement Syndrome, and, like Covid, there are different strains. There is Vance Derangement Syndrome and also a Musk variation. The news that police on Tuesday raided the Paris offices of X is not a surprise. For more than a year government officials have accused Elon Musk’s platform of using algorithms to interfere in French politics, and they are now accusing X of alleged cybercrime. Musk has described the raid as a “political attack.”
It is a fanciful idea to believe Musk is manipulating political discourse in France, as absurd as the suggestion that France never dirties its hands dealing with brutal regimes.
It might actually be an idea if the French government asks Capgemini to bring its software to bear on its own migrant crisis. It was revealed last week that levels of legal and illegal immigration in France have never been greater. Furthermore, each year on average 150,000 people are served with deportation orders but only between 10 and 15 percent of these are successfully executed.
Last month a Tunisian under a deportation order allegedly raped a 90-year-old in Nice and an Algerian also facing expulsion allegedly raped a 15-year-old in a Parisian suburb. This is the scandal that should be provoking outrage in the French parliament, not what is happening on the other side of the world.
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