Since Donald Trump returned to the White House last January, the biggest names in tech have mostly fallen in line with the new regime, attending dinners with officials, heaping praise upon the administration, presenting the president with lavish gifts, and pleading for Trump’s permission to sell their products to China. It’s been mostly business as usual for Silicon Valley over the past year, even as the administration ignored a wide range of constitutional norms and attempted to slap arbitrary fees on everything from chip exports to worker visas for high-skilled immigrants employed by tech firms.
But after an ICE agent shot and killed an unarmed US citizen, Renee Nicole Good, in broad daylight in Minneapolis last week, a number of tech leaders have begun publicly speaking out about the Trump administration’s tactics. This includes prominent researchers at Google and Anthropic, who have denounced the killing as calloused and immoral. The most wealthy and powerful tech CEOs are still staying silent as ICE floods America’s streets, but now some researchers and engineers working for them have chosen to break rank.
More than 150 tech workers have so far signed a petition asking for their company CEOs to call the White House, demand that ICE leave US cities, and speak out publicly against the agency’s recent violence. Anne Diemer, a human resources consultant and former Stripe employee who organized the petition, says that workers at Meta, Google, Amazon, OpenAI, TikTok, Spotify, Salesforce, Linkedin, and Rippling are among those who have signed. The group plans to make the list public once they reach 200 signatories.
“I think so many tech folks have felt like they can’t speak up,” Diemer told WIRED. “I want tech leaders to call the country’s leaders and condemn ICE’s actions, but even if this helps people find their people and take a small part in fighting fascism, then that’s cool, too.”
Nikhil Thorat, an engineer at Anthropic, said in a lengthy post on X that Good’s killing had “stirred something” in him. “A mother was gunned down in the street by ICE, and the government doesn’t even have the decency to perform a scripted condolence,” he wrote. Thorat added that the moral foundation of modern society is “infected, and is festering,” and the country is living through a “cosplay” of Nazi Germany, a time when people also stayed silent out of fear.
Jonathan Frankle, chief AI scientist at Databricks, added a “+1” to Thorat’s post. Shrisha Radhakrishna, chief technology and chief product officer of real estate platform Opendoor, replied that what happened to Good is “not normal. It’s immoral. The speed at which the administration is moving to dehumanize a mother is terrifying.” Other users who identified themselves as employees at OpenAI and Anthropic also responded in support of Thorat.
Shortly after Good was shot, Jeff Dean, an early Google employee and University of Minnesota graduate who is now the chief scientist at Google DeepMind and Google Research, began re-sharing posts with his 400,000 X followers criticizing the Trump administration’s immigration tactics, including one outlining circumstances in which deadly force isn’t justified for police officers interacting with moving vehicles.
He then weighed in himself. “This is completely not okay, and we can’t become numb to repeated instances of illegal and unconstitutional action by government agencies,” Dean wrote in an X post on January 10. “The recent days have been horrific.” He linked to a video of a teenager—identified as a US citizen—being violently arrested at a Target in Richfield, Minnesota.
In response to US Vice President JD Vance’s assertion on X that Good was trying to run over the ICE agent with her vehicle, Aaron Levie, the CEO of the cloud storage company Box, replied, “Why is he shooting after he’s fully out of harm’s way (2nd and 3rd shot)? Why doesn’t he just move away from the vehicle instead of standing in front of it?” He added a screenshot of a Justice Department webpage outlining best practices for law enforcement officers interacting with suspects in moving vehicles.
Even venture capitalist Jason Calacanis, who cohosts the popular All In podcast with White House AI and crypto adviser David Sacks, suggested that “masked unidentified federal agents asking people for their ‘papers’ are breaking the 4th amendment.”
Thorat, Dean, Levie, and Calacanis did not immediately respond to requests for comment from WIRED.
The tech sector’s response to sociopolitical crises over the past several years have been a mixed bag. During the nationwide protests in the aftermath of George Floyd’s murder six years ago, many large tech companies issued statements against systemic racism and police brutality and pledged to diversify their workforces. Some of those commitments were criticized as being hollow, and “DEI” soon became a political flashpoint rather than a shared corporate goal. But now, in the wake of Good’s death and other reports of alleged violence by ICE agents, big tech companies and their CEOs are choosing to stay silent, a testament to how the political landscape in the US has rapidly changed.
There’s a long history in the US of business leaders avoiding taking a stand on political issues, says Margaret O’Mara, a historian who studies the history of politics and Silicon Valley. It was perhaps naive, she says, to believe that tech leaders were ever really kinder, gentler capitalists, even if they positioned their companies as socially progressive. “It’s important to remember that many of these tech leaders are people who are thinking about things from a business point of view,” O’Mara says.
But, she adds, a truism in American business is that political instability is not good for bottom lines. “The reason why American tech has been so successful is because the political climate has been calm enough for people to build great companies,” O’Mara says. Some leaders may want to believe that ICE arrests and the icy streets of Minnesota are far enough away from their own boardrooms not to have any impact, but that belief might not hold much longer.
The post Tech Workers Are Condemning ICE Even as Their CEOs Stay Quiet appeared first on Wired.
