The Trump administration’s approach to immigration has reached a level of violence that the tech industry cannot ignore. In 2026 so far, federal immigration agents have killed at least eight people, including at least two U.S. citizens in Minneapolis — Renee Good and Alex Pretti. As immigration enforcement has grown more extreme — even detaining school children seeking legal asylum — tech workers have called on their leaders to speak up.
The tech industry has always been entwined in politics. Companies like Palantir, Clearview AI, Flock, and Paragon are contracted by U.S. Immigrations and Customs Enforcement and assist in the agency’s crackdowns. But as President Trump took office last year, his industry connections have grown. Elon Musk ran a government agency for months, and prolific Silicon Valley investor David Sacks is leading an advisory board on technology for the president. The CEOs behind some of the largest companies in the country — like Meta’s Mark Zuckerberg, Apple’s Tim Cook, and Google’s Sundar Pichai — had prime seats at Trump’s inauguration and have remained allied with him.
“We know our industry leaders have leverage: in October, they persuaded Trump to call off a planned ICE surge in San Francisco,” ICEout.tech, a group of tech industry workers opposing ICE, wrote in a statement on January 24, the day of ICU nurse Alex Pretti’s death. “Big tech CEOs are in the White House tonight,” the statement added, referring to a screening of a documentary about Melania Trump where Cook, Amazon’s Andy Jassy, and Zoom’s Eric Yuan were in attendance. “Now they need to go further, and join us in demanding ICE out of all of our cities.”
Some of tech’s biggest players have since spoken out, to mixed reception from their employees and the industry. Below, we are keeping an ongoing list of what tech leaders have had to say.
Reid Hoffman, co-founder of LinkedIn
LinkedIn co-founder Reid Hoffman, a major Democratic donor, published an editorial in the San Francisco Standard on January 29, calling on Silicon Valley to stop trying to be neutral in the wake of the Minnesota killings.
“We in Silicon Valley can’t bend the knee to Trump,” Hoffman wrote. “We can’t shrink away and just hope the crisis will fade. We know now that hope without action is not a strategy — it’s an invitation for Trump to trample whatever he can see, including our own business and security interests.”
He said he’s been encouraged to see more tech leaders speaking out, saying: “it’s a good start to something America needs much more of right now.”
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“Whichever candidates you may have supported in the past — or even if (like many of my friends in Silicon Valley) you don’t usually do politics — you almost surely did not want this,” he wrote.
Sam Altman, CEO at OpenAI
OpenAI CEO Sam Altman had publicly opposed Trump’s policies during his first term, but has changed his tune in the new administration as his company has struck deals to develop AI infrastructure for the U.S. government, including the gargantuan $500 billion Stargate project.
In the days following Pretti’s death, Altman addressed OpenAI staff in an internal Slack message, which was reported by The New York Times.
“What’s happening with ICE is going too far. There is a big difference between deporting violent criminals and what’s happening now, and we need to get the distinction right,” he said. “President Trump is a very strong leader, and I hope he will rise to this moment and unite the country.”
Altman added, “We didn’t become super woke when that was popular, we didn’t start talking about masculine corporate energy when that was popular, and we are not going to make a lot of performative statements now about safety or politics or anything else. But we are going to continue to try to figure out how to actually do the right thing as best as we can.”
Dario Amodei, CEO at Anthropic
In an NBC interview, anchor Tom Llamas asked Dario Amodei about his views on defense in relation to current events. The anchor pointed out that Anthropic has a contract with the U.S. Department of Defense, and that it has partnered with Palantir — which has supplied technology to ICE — on projects for that agency.
First, Amodei reaffirmed that Anthropic does not have any contracts with ICE, despite its relationship with the Defense Department, and emphasized his concern about “the need to protect democracies against autocracies” like China and Russia.
“I’m a big believer in, carefully, with guardrails, arming democracies to defend against these countries,” Amodei said, adding that these values persist in the context of internal American politics.
“We need to be really careful about making sure democracies are worth defending. We need to defend our own democratic values at home,” he said. “I believe some of the things we’ve seen in the last few days concern me about that.”
He also mentioned ICE’s raids in Minneapolis in a post on X, where he referred to “the horror we’re seeing in Minnesota.”
Tim Cook, CEO at Apple
Apple’s CEO addressed staff in an internal memo on January 27:
“This is a time for deescalation,” Cook said. He later added, “I had a good conversation with the president this week where I shared my views, and I appreciate his openness to engaging on issues that matter to us all.”
Meredith Whittaker, president of Signal
Like the tech industry workers behind ICEout.tech, Signal President Meredith Whittaker has been outspoken about the role tech leaders have in social justice.
“I want everyone in tech who’s ever intoned about freedom, or their love of privacy, or their commitment to liberty, to join me in an unequivocal condemnation,” Whittaker wrote on X.
In another post, she said, “Masked agents of the US state are executing people in the streets and powerful leaders are openly lying to cover for them. To everyone in my industry who’s ever claimed to value freedom—draw on the courage of your convictions and stand up.”
As an end-to-end-encrypted messaging app, Signal is often used by activists to organize community actions.
Tony Stubblebine, CEO at Medium
The leader of the online publishing platform Medium, Tony Stubblebine posted screenshots on Threads of a message he shared with staff in which he explains his reasoning for allowing employees to take part in a nationwide general strike if they so choose, though he clarified that he is “not in the business of dictating people’s politics.”
“I started the week in my own head and heart over what I was seeing in Minneapolis and really struggling with the idea that those two murders were just the tip of the iceberg of wrongs,” Stubblebine wrote.
In the memo, he writes about the difficulty of navigating his role as a tech CEO during this time, saying that it feels “awkward to navigate being both on-mission and on-money.” He added that he is thinking about the company’s “responsibility to make [its] stance clear, especially as many other tech orgs are donating to the Trump campaign and supporting the current administration’s agenda.”
Stubblebine also pointed out that Medium’s approach to its role as a web publisher reflects the greater values of the company — “for example, that we don’t allow things like hateful content or racist slurs on Medium.”
Jeff Dean, chief scientist at Google DeepMind
Jeff Dean has spoken out about his reaction to the killings in Minnesota.
“This is absolutely shameful,” Dean wrote on X, responding to a video of federal agents shooting Alex Pretti. “Agents of a federal agency unnecessarily escalating, and then executing a defenseless citizen whose offense appears to be using his cell phone camera. Every person regardless of political affiliation should be denouncing this.”
James Dyett, OpenAI’s head of global business
James Dyett posted on X about what he sees as hypocrisy in the tech industry.
“There is far more outrage from tech leaders over a wealth tax than masked ICE agents terrorizing communities and executing civilians in the streets,” Dyett said. “Tells you what you need to know about the values of our industry.”
Keith Rabois, Ethan Choi, and Vinod Khosla, partners at Khosla Ventures
While Khosla Ventures partner Keith Rabois has publicly expressed support for ICE and the Trump administration’s practices, others at the firm have publicly opposed these views.
Rabois made incendiary comments on X after border patrol agents killed ICU nurse Alex Pretti in Minneapolis, prompting one founder to respond that that if he were a founder in Khosla Ventures’ portfolio, he would give the money back, calling Rabois “an embarrassment.”
Ethan Choi, another partner at Khosla Ventures, responded to the post to clarify that not everyone at the firm agrees with Rabois’ views. “I want to make it clear that Keith doesn’t represent everyone’s views here at [Khosla Ventures], at least not mine,” Choi wrote, adding: “What happened in Minnesota is plain wrong. Don’t know how you could really see it differently. Sad to see a person’s life taken unnecessarily.”
Vinod Khosla, the firm’s founder, reposted Choi’s message and called the federal agents “macho ICE vigilantes running amuck empowered by a conscious-less administration.”
“The video was sickening to watch and the storytelling without facts or with invented fictitious facts by authorities almost unimaginable in a civilized society,” Khosla wrote. “ICE personnel must have ice water running thru their veins to treat other human beings this way. There is politics but humanity should transcend that.”
Khosla also posted on X that he agrees with Hoffman, the LinkedIn co-founder, that more tech executives should speak out against the Trump administration.
