You're making an excellent point that I think people are misunderstanding, unfortunately:

Let's say github's goal was to define license terms such that ICE is banned, but not other legitimate companies that do a lot of good for the world.

It would be great if solving this was as easy as saying "you can only use this if you never aim to separate children from their families", but it's not, because such a term would also require you to boycott Child Protective Services -- which can and does save children victims from horribly abusive parents and other terrible circumstances.

I've personally known people who were repeatedly raped by a family member throughout their early childhood. This is incredibly, devastatingly evil. It DOES happen, and if after acknowledging this, you seriously think there is still NO circumstance in which a child should be separated from their family -- then you are a horrible human being. But I don't think any of the downvoters think this, so I am genuinely curious: Why do you really think such a simple, un-nuanced license term would work without harmful side-effects?

Note: You can't just say "we'll enforce the license terms subjectively". Selective enforcement defeats the whole point of adding it into your terms of service or licensing terms -- because then, you might as well just go back to ad-hoc boycotting as per the personal ethics of your corporation's senior leadership. Aside from that, you do have to precisely define what you mean -- precisely which scenarios are or are not tolerable to you, etc.

> NO circumstance in which a child should be separated from their family

In fact, the reason ICE separates adults from children in the first place is to fight human trafficking and child abuse: they used to keep the children with their accompanying adults (who aren’t guaranteed to be their parents, which seems to be overlooked in these arguments), but they found that the children were being assaulted by the primary adult population, so they started creating child-only facilities to combat this.

Asserting that ICE made that finding and stopped detaining children with parents together based on it is false. ICE didn't even make the decision to stop family detention, the US District Court for the Central District of California in 2015 (in a decision appealed to and upheld by the US Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit in 2016), applying rules from the 1997 Flores settlement, prohibited extended detention of children with adults (and ICE continues to operate family detention facilities within the limits of that court order.) This did force separation in detention when extended, but this was actively mitigated for the remaining part of Obama’s term, IIRC, by ICE not detaining adults or their children for illegal entry alone when that would result in separation of parents from their children (they didn't stop immigration proceedings against them, just didn't detain them during the process, unless there were additional reasons.)