More than 400 tech workers have urged their CEOs to "call the White House and demand ICE leave our cities" after masked federal agents shot and killed Alex Pretti over the weekend and the world's richest and most powerful chief executives remained silent.
In October, when President Trump threatened to send federal law enforcement to San Francisco, tech leaders reportedly called the White House and Trump reversed course, telling reporters that phone calls from Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang and Salesforce CEO Marc Benioff had changed his mind.
Meanwhile, US Immigration and Customs Enforcement and National Guard troops were deployed to other cities, including Portland, Los Angeles, Chicago, and Minneapolis, where federal agents have now shot and killed two people, Pretti and Renee Good, this month.
The tech industry's C-suite has yet to publicly speak out against these recent fatal shootings involving federal agents - or the larger dismantling of democracy and the international order under the Trump administration - but their employees are, with hundreds of workers from Amazon, Apple, Google, Meta, Microsoft, Nvidia, Salesforce, and many, many other companies demanding ICE leave American cities.
"This cannot continue, and we know the tech industry can make a difference," according to the ICEout tech petition that calls on CEOs to do three things:
As of mid-Monday, about 450 tech employees had signed the letter.
The Register contacted 16 companies (Amazon, Apple, Cisco, Cloudflare, Google, IBM, Lyft, Intel, Meta, Microsoft, Nvidia, Okta, OpenAI, PayPal, Salesforce, and Stripe) whose employees signed their support for the ICEout efforts and asked if their CEOs planned to take any of the above actions.
None of them immediately responded to our inquiries.
On Sunday, more than 60 CEOs of large Minnesota-based companies, including 3M, Best Buy, General Mills, Target, and UnitedHealth, signed an open letter "calling for an immediate deescalation of tensions and for state, local and federal officials to work together to find real solutions." ®
Source: The register