More than 450 tech workers, including cyber leaders, sign petition urging companies to end ICE contracts
Hundreds of US tech workers, including senior cybersecurity execs from Cloudflare, Akamai, Okta, CrowdStrike, and SentinelOne, have signed a petition urging their sector to end contracts and cooperation with US Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE).
The petition, IceOut, which first started to circulate around two weeks ago, details how tech bosses helped dissuade President Trump from deploying federal officers to San Francisco in October. It is now appealing to the tech community to help oust ICE agents in all US cities.
The open letter has gained traction over the last week or so and was still circulating on Saturday, following the killing of ICU nurse Alex Pretti by border control police in Minneapolis.
Pretti was the second citizen this month to be shot and killed by ICE agents, after Renee Nicole Good was killed by an immigration agent on January 7th.
To date, the petition has now gained over 450 signatories – with a notable level of seniority – and was still circulating as Gregory Bovino, a senior ICE official overseeing recent enforcement actions, was expected to leave Minneapolis on Tuesday.
The pledge, titled ‘Tech demands ICE out of our cities’ calls on tech firms to stop building, selling, or maintaining technology that supports ICE operations and to publicly commit to refusing future work with the agency.
It also urges company leaders to call on the White House to “remove ICE from US cities,” “Speak up publicly against ICE violence,” and to “cancel all existing contracts with ICE.”
“Tech professionals are speaking up against this brutality, and we call on all our colleagues who share our values to use their voice. We know our industry leaders have leverage: in October, they persuaded Trump to call off a planned ICE surge in San Francisco, and big tech CEOs are in the White House tonight. Now they need to go further, and join us in demanding ICE out of all of our cities."
ICEOut petition
In an update on Saturday (January 24th) ICEout.tech wrote:
"We condemn the Border Patrol’s killing of Alex Pretti and the violent surge of federal agents across our cities. The wanton brutality we’ve seen from ICE and CBP has removed any credibility that these actions are about immigration enforcement. Their goal is terror, cruelty, and suppression of dissent. This must end."
ICEOut update - Saturday
IceOut: a growing list of signatories
While the tech industry's C-suite has yet to publicly speak out against these recent fatal shootings involving federal agents, their employees have.
According to the signatory list, notables so far include current and former CEOs, venture investors, vice presidents, directors, and engineers.
Among the senior figures to lend their names to the petition – as per the published list of signatories – include Mike McCue, CEO of Flipboard; Military Mason, CEO of Hidden Door, and former chief data scientist at Bitly.
The list also includes dozens of staff and principal engineers from companies such as Google, Amazon, Meta, Microsoft, Apple, Salesforce, and NVIDIA.
Among the contingent of cyber professionals are Jan Schaumann, chief information architect at Akamai, Jake Everett, vice president of offensive security at Rule 4, and Dr. Michael Rosenberg, a senior research engineer at Cloudflare.
Additional signatories identify themselves as security engineers or infrastructure specialists at companies including CrowdStrike, SentinelOne, Okta, Datadog, AWS, Google Cloud, and Oracle Health.
According to The Washington Post, the petition was initially drafted by AnnE Diemer, a San Francisco human resources consultant.
“There is such a stereotype that tech is with Trump on this, and there are a lot of tech companies that have contracts with ICE, and I wanted to show that it isn’t all of us. We have a lot of power as a collective," she said.
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