More than 800 US tech workers have signed a petition calling for tech CEOs to demand the Trump administration remove US Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents from US cities and cancel contracts with the agency.
“We know our industry leaders have leverage: in October, they persuaded Trump to call off a planned ICE surge in San Francisco,” the petition reads. “Now they need to go further, and join us in demanding ICE out of all of our cities.”
Signatories include nearly a hundred employees from Google, as well as dozens more from Meta, Amazon and OpenAI. One unnamed “Exec VP” from Elon Musk’s Tesla is also on the list.
The killing of the 37-year-old nurse Alex Pretti in Minneapolis by ICE agents over the weekend has generated a widespread backlash from groups as varied as Reddit users, a union of registered nurses, faith leaders and the right-leaning National Rifle Association.
However, tech CEOs are seen as being uniquely placed to influence the course of the Trump administration’s policy. In October, Trump appeared to call off a planned ICE surge in San Francisco after calls from tech leaders, in particular Nvidia’s Jensen Huang and the chief executive of Salesforce, Marc Benioff. “Friends of mine who live in the area called last night to ask me not to go forward with the surge,” the US president wrote on social media at the time.
Whether they will act now is another question. Some tech leaders have come out against ICE, including Anthropic’s CEO, Dario Amodei, who wrote in a post on X on Tuesday about the importance of “preserving democratic values and rights at home”.
James Dyett, OpenAI’s head of global business, wrote on X: “There is far more outrage from tech leaders over a wealth tax than masked ICE agents terrorizing communities and executing civilians in the streets. Tells you what you need to know about the values of our industry.”
Neither OpenAI’s Sam Altman, Nvidia’s Huang nor Apple’s CEO, Tim Cook, appear to have posted or written on Pretti’s killing. Tim Cook was one among a group of tech CEOs invited to the White House on Saturday for a private screening of the documentary Melania, along with Zoom’s CEO, Eric Yuan.
Tech workers have been largely silent about politics in the first year of the Trump administration.
That tide is turning, say the petitioners. “It’ll be pretty hard to do good research in a ‘masked men execute civilians on the street’ political environment,” wrote one Google DeepMind researcher. “That possibility grows & you should plan for it.”
