Tech Workers Are Condemning ICE Even as Their CEOs Stay Quiet

since donald trump Returning to the White House last January, the tech sector’s biggest names mostly fell in line with the new regime, attending dinners with officials, praising the administration, presenting the president with lavish gifts, and appealing to Trump to allow China to sell their products. It was largely business as usual in Silicon Valley last year, even as the administration ignored a wide range of constitutional norms and attempted to impose arbitrary fees on everything from chip exports to worker visas for high-skilled immigrants employed by tech companies.

But after Renee Nicole Good, an unarmed US citizen, was shot dead in broad daylight by an ICE agent in Minneapolis last week, many tech leaders have begun to speak out publicly about the Trump administration’s tactics. This includes prominent researchers from Google and Anthropic, who have condemned the killing as cruel and unethical. The richest and most powerful tech CEOs are still silent as ICE floods America’s streets, but now some of the researchers and engineers who work for them have chosen to break ranks.

So far, more than 150 tech workers have signed a petition calling for their company’s CEO to be called to the White House, ICE to leave US cities, and to speak out publicly against the agency’s recent violence. Anne Diemer, a human resources consultant and former Stripe employee who organized the petition, says signers include employees at Meta, Google, Amazon, OpenAI, TikTok, Spotify, Salesforce, LinkedIn, and Rippling. The group plans to make the list public once it reaches 200 signatories.

“I think a lot of tech people have felt like they can’t speak,” Diemer told WIRED. “I want tech leaders to call the country’s leaders and condemn ICE’s actions, but if it helps people find their people and take a small part in fighting fascism, that’s good too.”

Anthropic engineer Nikhil Thorat said in a lengthy post on X that Good’s murder had caused “something of a stir” in him. “A mother was shot on the street by ICE, and the government doesn’t even have the decency to offer a written condolence,” he wrote. Thorat said that the moral foundations of modern society are “infected, and rotting” and that the country is living through a “cosplay” of Nazi Germany, a time when people kept quiet out of fear.

Jonathan Frankel, chief AI scientist at Databricks, added “+1” to Thorat’s post. Srisha Radhakrishna, chief technology and chief product officer of real estate platform Opendoor, responded that what happened to Good is “not normal. It is immoral. The speed at which the administration is moving to dehumanize a mother is appalling.” Other users who identified themselves as employees of 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 chief scientist at Google DeepMind and Google Research, began re-sharing posts with his 400,000

Then he weighed himself. “This is simply not okay, and we cannot become numb to repeated incidents of illegal and unconstitutional action by government agencies,” Dean wrote in an X post on January 10. “Recent days have been terrifying.” He linked to video of a teen arrested for violently attacking a Target in Richfield, Minnesota – who was identified as a US citizen.

In response to US Vice President J.D. Vance’s claim on Twitter that Goode was trying to run over an ICE agent with her vehicle, Aaron Levy, CEO of cloud storage company Box, responded, “Why is he still shooting after being completely out of harm’s way (second and third shots)? Why doesn’t he just walk away from the vehicle instead of standing in front of the vehicle?” He added a screenshot of a Justice Department web page that outlines best practices for law enforcement officers interacting with suspects in moving vehicles.