Tech workers condemn ICE even as its executives remain silent

Since Donald Trump He returned to the White House last January, and the biggest names in technology have joined the new regime. Attending dinner With officials, they praise the administration and present it to the president Luxurious giftsand demanding Trump’s permission to sell it Products to China. It’s been mostly business as usual for Silicon Valley over the past year, even as the administration ignored a wide range of constitutional standards and tried to impose arbitrary fees on everything from Chip exports to Worker visas For highly skilled immigrants who work in technology companies.

But after a Ice agent Gunmen shot and killed an unarmed American citizen, Rene Nicole Goode, in broad daylight in Minneapolis. Last weeka number of tech leaders have begun speaking out about the Trump administration’s tactics. This includes prominent researchers at Google and Anthropic, who condemned the killing as cruel and immoral. Tech’s richest and most powerful CEOs are still keeping quiet as ICE floods America’s streets, but now some of the researchers and engineers who work for them are choosing to go out of their way.

More than 150 tech workers have so far signed a petition asking their company CEOs to contact the White House, demand that ICE leave American cities, and speak out against the agency’s recent violence. Workers at Meta, Google, Amazon, OpenAI, TikTok, Spotify, Salesforce, Linkedin and Rippling are among those who have signed, says Anne Diemer, an HR consultant and former Stripe employee who organized the petition. The group plans to publish the list once it reaches 200 locations.

“I think a lot of tech workers felt like they couldn’t speak up,” Demmer told WIRED. “I want tech leaders to call the country’s 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 the outbreak, that’s great, too.”

Nikhil Thorat, an engineer at Anthropic, said in a lengthy post on X that Judd’s killing “triggered something” inside him. “A mother was shot to death 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 foundation of modern society is “tainted and worsening”, and that the country is living a “representation” of Nazi Germany, a time when people also remained silent out of fear.

Jonathan Frankel, chief AI scientist at Databricks, added a “+1” to Thorat’s post. What happened to Good “is not normal. It’s unethical. And the speed with which the administration is moving to dehumanize the mother is terrifying,” Shresha Radhakrishna, chief technology officer and chief product officer at real estate platform Opendoor, responded. Other users who identified themselves as OpenAI and Anthropic employees also responded in support of Thorat.

Shortly after Judd’s shooting, Jeff Dean, an early Google employee and University of Minnesota graduate who is now chief scientist at Google DeepMind and Google Research, began resharing posts with his 400,000 followers, criticizing the Trump administration’s immigration tactics, including one outlining circumstances in which it would not be justified to use lethal force on police officers interacting with moving vehicles.

Then he weighed himself. “This is not good at all, and we cannot afford to be numb to repeated instances of illegal and unconstitutional actions by government agencies,” Dean wrote in a Jan. 10 X post. “The last days were terrible.” He linked a video of a teen — identified as a U.S. citizen — being violently arrested at a Target in Richfield, Minnesota.

In response to US Vice President J.D. Vance confirmation In Added screenshot of Ministry of Justice web page Identify best practices for law enforcement officers who interact with vehicle transport suspects.