While many tech workers protested President Donald Trump’s policies during his first term, Silicon Valley’s rank and file has been quieter over the past year as their bosses genuflect to his administration. But that may be changing following the killings of Renee Good and Alex Pretti in Minneapolis.
Last week, following the killing of Good, more than 200 Silicon Valley staffers published a letter urging tech leaders to use their platforms to call for ICE’s removal from U.S. cities. As of Tuesday, following the killing of Pretti, the letter has more than 450 signatories, including employees from Google, Amazon and TikTok.
The letter argues that tech leaders have a unique ability to influence Trump. “Today we’re calling on our CEOs to pick up the phone,” the letter reads. It also calls on tech companies to end their contracts with ICE.
The hundreds of staffers who signed the letter make up a small fraction of Silicon Valley. But the letter is the first major organized protest from the tech world against Trump in years—and a sign that what used to be a loud and progressive bloc may be stirring to life.
“For a lot of people who have tried to keep their heads down, just the sheer horror of what’s happening on our streets has shocked them into realizing they have to say something,” says Pete Warden, a startup founder and former Google engineer who signed the letter.
Shifting Times
During the first Trump administration, many Big Tech employees responded with outrage to Trump’s policies, particularly around immigration. Google co-founder Sergey Brin, for example, joined a protest against Trump’s Muslim ban at the San Francisco airport in 2017.
But when President Biden took the White House, many Silicon Valley leaders became disenchanted by his posture toward Big Tech. Many tech leaders proceeded to pour money into Trump’s campaign during the 2024 elections, and then sought closer ties to him following his victory.
Mike Brock, a former executive at Block who now writes the political Substack Notes from the Circus, says that before the election, “the entirety of the managerial class of Silicon Valley well understood that if Donald Trump won, that there was going to need to be a kneeling.” He adds that in the past year, tech workers have stopped speaking out because “they understand they’ll lose their job.”
Last year, many stories were written about Silicon Valley’s rightward shift, as exemplified by leaders like Marc Andreessen and Elon Musk. But Warden contends that many of the actual workers in the Bay retained their left-leaning politics. “I hear from a lot of people in private that they’re appalled by what’s happening, but unlike Trump One, they don’t feel like they have the safety or security to be able to speak out,” he says.
Meanwhile, tech tools have become increasingly central to Trump’s approach to overhauling parts of the federal bureaucracy via the Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE), targeting undocumented migrants, and developing weapons of war. ICE deploys AI and facial recognition to surveil those without legal status and to monitor public speech. AWS (Amazon Web Services) provides ICE with data storage services. In October, Apple and Google removed apps that alerted people when ICE agents were nearby following pressure from Attorney General Pam Bondi. And last week, ICE asked tech companies to provide information about “commercial Big Data and Ad Tech” products that would “directly support investigations activities.”
Deaths in Minneapolis Spark Outrage
But video footage of the deaths of Good and Pretti—which appeared to directly contradict the accounts of federal officials—compelled some tech leaders to publicly speak up. On Saturday, Reid Hoffman wrote on X that it was “time for all Americans” to stand up against ICE. Jeff Dean, chief scientist at Google DeepMind, called Pretti’s killing “absolutely shameful,” while Yann LeCun commented: “murderers.”
Warden says that the outcry from leaders gave cover to tech employees, and that he has spoken with several colleagues who have not yet signed the letter but say they plan to. “It hasn’t been possible to talk about any of this in a work setting because you were never sure if you were going to be fired,” he says. “But now, seeing some of the industry leaders like Jeff Dean take a stand, I am hoping this will be the seed for a lot more actions going forward.”
White House spokeswoman Abigail Jackson responded to the letter by saying to The Washington Post that “ICE officers act heroically” and that those criticizing ICE are “simply doing the bidding of criminal illegal aliens.”
Warden says that he fears retaliation for speaking out, especially from VCs who may not want to fund his startup, Moonshine AI. “By speaking out, I can potentially be seen as a problematic founder, which may hurt or kill my company,” he says. “But compared to the risks that I see people in Minneapolis taking every day, that seems pretty small in the grand scheme of things.”
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