Tech Workers Are Condemning ICE Even as Their CEOs Stay Quiet

Since Donald Trump Returning to the White House last January, tech’s biggest names mostly aligned themselves with the new regime, attending dinners with officials, praising the administration, showering the president with lavish gifts and pleading for Trump’s permission to sell their products to China. It has been largely business as usual for Silicon Valley over the past year, even as the administration has ignored a wide range of constitutional norms and attempted to impose arbitrary fees on everything from chip exports to work visas for high-skilled immigrants employed by tech companies.

But after an ICE agent fatally shot an unarmed U.S. citizen, Renee Nicole Good, in broad daylight in Minneapolis last week, a number of tech industry leaders began speaking out publicly about the Trump administration’s tactics. This includes prominent researchers from Google and Anthropic, who denounced the killing as callous and immoral. The richest and most powerful tech CEOs are remaining silent as ICE floods America’s streets, but some researchers and engineers working for them have chosen to stand out.

So far, more than 150 tech workers have signed a petition asking their companies’ CEOs to call the White House, demand that ICE leave U.S. 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 workers at Meta, Google, Amazon, OpenAI, TikTok, Spotify, Salesforce, Linkedin and Rippling are among the signatories. The group plans to make the list public once it reaches 200 signatories.

“I think a lot of tech people feel 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 it helps people reunite with their people and take a small part in the fight against fascism, then that’s cool too.”

Nikhil Thorat, an engineer at Anthropic, said in a lengthy article on X that Good’s murder had “stirred something” in him. “A mother was shot in the street by ICE, and the government doesn’t even have the decency to offer written condolences,” he wrote. Thorat added that the moral foundations of modern society are “infected and festering” and that the country is experiencing a “cosplay” of Nazi Germany, a time when people also kept silent out of fear.

Jonathan Frankle, Chief AI Scientist at Databricks, added a “+1” to Thorat’s post. Shrisha Radhakrishna, chief technology officer and chief product officer of real estate platform Opendoor, responded that what happened to Good is “not normal. It’s immoral. The speed at which the administration is working to dehumanize a mother is terrifying.” 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 the chief scientist at Google DeepMind and Google Research, began sharing posts with his 400,000 followers criticizing the Trump administration’s immigration tactics, including one describing circumstances in which deadly force is not justified for police officers interacting with moving vehicles.

He then weighed himself. “This is absolutely not acceptable, and we cannot remain insensitive to repeated instances of illegal and unconstitutional actions by government agencies,” Dean wrote in an X post on January 10. “The last few days have been horrible.” He linked to a video of a teenager — identified as a U.S. citizen — being violently arrested at a Target in Richfield, Minnesota.

In response to U.S. Vice President JD Vance’s claim on He added a screenshot of a Justice Department webpage outlining best practices for law enforcement officers interacting with suspects in moving vehicles.