Silicon Valley Tech Workers Are Campaigning to Get ICE Out of US Cities

The first Trump the administration and the tech industry that resisted it both look more and more antiquated by the day.

Here’s an example: In 2017, when President Trump issued a series of executive orders instituting a travel ban on foreigners from certain countries (primarily those with a Muslim majority), citizens across the United States vigorously protested the policy. They included some of tech’s biggest players: Google co-founder Sergey Brin, who participated in a protest at the San Francisco airport; Amazon founder Jeff Bezos, who wrote a company-wide email outlining the “legal options” Amazon was considering to fight the ban; and Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg, who used Instagram to describe his own family’s immigrant roots.

How times have changed. On Saturday, hours after federal agents fatally shot intensive care nurse Alex Pretti on the streets of Minneapolis, several prominent tech executives attended a private White House screening of Melaniea documentary released by (of course) Amazon MGM Studios. The moment was not lost on the group of Silicon Valley workers who recently launched ICEout.tech, essentially an open letter to their bosses. The letter, released following the murder of Renée Nicole Good earlier this month, has now been signed by more than 1,000 tech employees. These workers, from every major tech company and startup, are calling on leaders to use their influence to demand that Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents leave U.S. cities, cancel corporate contracts with the agency, and speak publicly about ICE’s violent and deadly tactics.

Workers’ demands were commonplace under Trump 1.0, when tech employees at the world’s largest companies often spoke out — internally and externally — about the cruelty of the U.S. administration and the industry’s role in facilitating or moderating its most cowardly policies. Today, however, a movement like ICEout.tech seems downright revolutionary: Tech employees have been notably silent over the past year, as the power dynamics within their companies tilted in favor of management over front-line workers. Meanwhile, the executives of these companies have been busy fucking the ring — at a White House dinner or with insanely expensive documentaries that no one watches — at every opportunity.

Is the dam finally breaking? This week, Silicon Valley leaders, including Anthropic executives Dario and Daniela Amodei, OpenAI CEO Sam Altman, and Apple CEO Tim Cook, finally called out ICE’s outrageous excesses. It’s a start, but I wanted to know more about what was happening in tech circles and where the industry would go from here. So I asked two of ICEout.tech’s original signatories, Pete Warden, CEO of Moonshine AI, and Lisa Conn, co-founder of Gatherround, to sit down for an emergency episode of The big interview.

Here is our conversation.