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By Hanna Ziady, CNN

London (CNN) — The backlash against ICE has grown beyond US borders.

Capgemini, a major French consulting and information technology company, said Sunday it will sell a US division that does business with Immigration and Customs Enforcement.

Like other businesses with links to ICE, Capgemini has come under scrutiny as criticism mounts over the agency’s heavy-handed enforcement tactics. Jim Pattison Developments, a real estate company, and Hootsuite, a social media company, are two Canadian businesses that have faced public pressure for their links to ICE.

Anti-ICE marches were held in several major US cities over the weekend in response to the Trump administration’s crackdown on undocumented immigrants, which has resulted in the fatal shootings of two US citizens by ICE agents in Minneapolis.

Capgemini’s decision follows revelations that the Department of Homeland Security had awarded the US division in question a $4.8 million contract in mid-December to provide ICE with “skip tracing services.” Skip tracing is the process of locating people who are difficult to find, using online information and other sources, such as voter registration data.

“The nature and scope of this work has raised questions compared to what we typically do as a business and technology firm,” Capgemini CEO Aiman Ezzat wrote in a LinkedIn post last week.

The decision to sell the US division comes after a Paris-based corporate watchdog, Multinationals Observatory, published details of the contract, prompting questions from France’s finance and economy minister Roland Lescure.

An archived Capgemini web page posted on the watchdog’s website states that Capgemini was working with ICE to “help it minimize the time required and cost incurred to remove all removable illegal aliens from the US.”

In a statement announcing the sale, Capgemini said legal restrictions associated with government work meant it was unable to “exercise appropriate control” over the US subsidiary’s operations to ensure it aligned with its objectives.

Capgemini said the unit represented 0.4% of the group’s global revenue in 2025 and less than 2% of its US revenue.

Meanwhile, Emily Lowan, the leader of the Green Party in British Columbia, has taken aim at Canadian billionaire Jim Pattison. Last week, she called on Canadians to boycott the businesses owned by the Jim Pattison Group, which include grocery chains, packaging firms and car dealerships among others, unless he “cut his ties” with ICE.

On Friday, Jim Pattison Developments, which is part of the Jim Pattison Group, said it would no longer proceed with plans to sell a warehouse in Ashland, Virginia, to the US Department of Homeland Security. It provided no further details. The company has not responded to CNN’s request for comment.

The industrial facility was to be used to “support ICE operations,” according to a letter last month from the Depa

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By Jackie Wattles, CNN

(CNN) — NASA has begun a crucial test Monday of its towering Space Launch System rocket — marking one of the final steps before the vehicle launches four astronauts into deep space for the first time since the Apollo program ended more than five decades ago. The mission could launch as soon as February 8.

The hands-on test, called a “wet dress rehearsal,” involves filling up the rocket’s tanks with more than 700,000 pounds of super-chilled propellants.

The rehearsal also is expected to include a run-through of the countdown on launch day — except that during the test run the clock will be halted with less than a minute to go.

How this test plays out will offer hints about when NASA will be able to launch the Artemis II mission — which could occur within several launch windows between early February and late April. At launch, NASA’s Christina Koch, Victor Glover and Reid Wiseman as well as the Canadian Space Agency’s Jeremy Hansen are expected to ride atop the SLS rocket before their Orion spacecraft separates and begins a journey to circumnavigate the moon.

NASA confirmed on January 23 that the crew members had entered quarantine in Houston in preparation for their spaceflight. Astronauts are routinely kept isolated ahead of liftoff to prevent illness.

The crew is expected to arrive at their Florida launch site at Kennedy Space Center after the wet dress rehearsal is complete.

Though the astronauts are not landing on the lunar surface for this mission, their trip is set to carry them deeper into the solar system than any humans have traveled, surpassing the record that Apollo 13 astronauts set in 1970.

Before liftoff, NASA is looking to put the SLS rocket through a clean wet dress rehearsal. Ahead of the rocket’s first flight — the uncrewed Artemis I test mission in 2022 — it took multiple wet dress rehearsals over months to ensure the systems were ready for launch.

During those test runs, launch controllers grappled with issues such as loading the super-chilled liquid oxygen as well as hydrogen leaks. Liquid hydrogen and liquid oxygen, or LOX, are the propellants that power the SLS rocket.

“Why do we think that we’ll be successful in Artemis II? It’s the lessons that we learned,” Charlie Blackwell-Thompson, the Artemis launch director, noted during a January 16 news conference.

“We learned a lot during the Artemis I campaign getting to launch. And the things that we learned … have all been rolled in to the way in which we intend to load the Artemis II vehicle.”

NASA, however, has cautioned that, although it expects prelaunch preparations to run more smoothly for this mission, engineers still have the option of rolling the SLS rocket and Orion spacecraft back off the launchpad and into the nearby Vehicle Assembly Building for additional work if needed.

Cold weather over the weekend delayed the initial date for a wet dress rehearsal.

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