Since Donald Trump they returned to the White House last January, the biggest names in technology are closely aligned with the new regime, going to dinner with officials, praising the administration, presenting the president with the best gifts, and asking for Trump’s permission to sell their products in China. It’s been business as usual in Silicon Valley over the past year, as administrations have ignored many constitutional norms and tried to impose unfair fees on everything from chip shipments to visas for high-skilled immigrant workers employed by tech firms.
But after an ICE agent shot and killed an unarmed U.S. citizen, Renee Nicole Good, in a Minneapolis bar last week, dozens of tech leaders have begun speaking out publicly about the Trump administration’s tactics. This includes prominent researchers at Google and Anthropic, who have condemned the execution as callous and immoral. The richest and most powerful tech CEOs have remained silent as ICE floods America’s streets, but now some of the researchers and engineers who work for them have chosen to break ranks.
More than 150 tech workers have so far signed a petition for their company executives to call the White House, demand ICE leave American cities, and speak out against the agency’s recent violence. Anne Diemer, a human resources consultant and former Stripe employee who organized the petition, says employees from 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 people in tech have felt like they can’t talk,” Diemer told WIRED. “I want tech leaders to call world leaders and condemn the actions of ICE, but even if this helps people find their people and play a small role in the fight against fascism, that’s cool.”
Nikhil Thorat, an engineer at Anthropic, said in a long post on X that Good’s killing “triggered something” for him. “My mother was shot on the street by ICE, and the government doesn’t even have the decency to offer condolences,” he wrote. Thorat added that the moral foundation of today’s society is “infected, and it’s collapsing,” and the country is living a “cosplay” of Nazi Germany, a time when people were also 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 company Opendoor, responded that what happened to Good is “unusual. It is immoral. The speed with which management is moving to destroy a mother is frightening.” Other users who identified themselves as employees at OpenAI and Anthropic also responded in support of Thorat.
Shortly after Good’s firing, Jeff Dean, an early Google employee and University of Minnesota graduate who is now a senior 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 telling case in which an unprovoked killing force cooperated with traffic police.
Then he weighed himself. “This is absolutely wrong, and we can’t be numb to the repeated instances of government actions that conflict with the law,” Dean wrote in an X letter 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 location in Richfield, Minnesota.
In response to US vice president JD Vance’s claim to X that Good was trying to run over an ICE agent with his car, Aaron Levie, CEO of cloud storage company Box, responded, “Why does he shoot after he’s out of harm’s way (2nd and 3rd shots)? Why doesn’t he just walk away from the car instead of standing in front of it?” He added a screenshot of the Department of Justice’s web page outlining best practices for police dealing with motor vehicle suspects.
