More than 800 US tech workers have signed a petition calling on tech chief executives to demand the Trump administration remove Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) agents from US cities and cancel contracts with the agency. Signatories include nearly a hundred employees from Google, as well as dozens from Meta, Amazon and OpenAI. An unnamed executive vice president from Elon Musk’s Tesla is also on the list.
The petition comes after the killing of 37-year-old nurse Alex Pretti by ICE agents in Minneapolis over the weekend, which has sparked widespread backlash from groups as varied as Reddit users, a union of registered nurses, faith leaders and the right-leaning National Rifle Association. The petition reads: 'We know our industry leaders have leverage: in October, they persuaded Trump to call off a planned ICE surge in San Francisco. Now they need to go further, and join us in demanding ICE out of all of our cities.'
Tech CEOs are seen as uniquely placed to influence the Trump administration’s policy. In October, Trump backed down from a planned ICE surge in San Francisco after calls from tech leaders, including Nvidia’s Jensen Huang and Salesforce CEO Marc Benioff. However, it remains unclear whether they will act now. Some leaders have spoken out, such as Anthropic’s CEO Dario Amodei, who emphasised the importance of 'preserving democratic values and rights at home'. But others, including OpenAI’s Sam Altman, Nvidia’s Huang and Apple’s Tim Cook, have not publicly commented on Pretti’s killing.
Tech workers have been largely silent on politics during the first year of the Trump administration, but petitioners say the tide is turning. One Google DeepMind researcher wrote: 'It’ll be pretty hard to do good research in a “masked men execute civilians on the street” political environment. That possibility grows & you should plan for it.' James Dyett, OpenAI’s head of global business, criticised tech leaders for showing more outrage over a wealth tax than 'masked ICE agents terrorizing communities and executing civilians in the streets'.
