The fatal shooting of an unarmed woman, who lost her life to a bullet shot by an ICE agent, has caused tech industry professionals to speak up. They’re condemning the Trump administration policy regarding immigration and demand their CEO’s speak up as well.
It was a tragic January 7th – a fatal bullet shot by an ICE agent led to grief and shock in the US. The 37-year-old Renee Good, mother of three and an American citizen, was shot in Minneapolis in her car.
The event caused a wave of outrage, including within the tech community of researchers and engineers who work for major businesses. And it’s not only the Good’s death that prompted the community to speak up, but the silence of their senior executives.
Since Donald Trump returned to the White House in January for his second term, many Silicon Valley heads have attempted to establish closer relations with the administration.
For instance, as per a Reuters report, in July 2025, some of the CEOs of the largest US tech and energy companies joined President Trump at the Pennsylvania Energy and Innovation Summit, where the administration announced it would be investing $90 billion in AI and energy infrastructure.
In the meantime, the White House began pursuing aggressive immigration policies and introduced changes to the H-1B visa, which affected how highly skilled, much-needed staff could enter the US tech industry.
However, it’s the passing of Good that seems to have finally triggered a coordinated backlash from the tech community.
More than 150 tech workers have signed an open petition calling on their company leaders to take a public stand against the Trump administration’s policy and urge the withdrawal of federal agents from US cities.
“Today, we’re calling on our CEOs to pick up the phone again: 1. Call the White House and demand that ICE leave our cities. 2. Cancel all company contracts with ICE. 3. Speak out publicly against ICE’s violence,” the petition reads.
The petition was organized by Anne Diemer, a former Stripe employee and human resources consultant. She told WIRED that staff from companies such as Meta, Google, Amazon, OpenAI, TikTok, Spotify, Salesforce, LinkedIn, and Rippling had added their names.
The organizers say they plan to publish the list once it reaches 200 signatories.
“I want tech leaders to call the country’s leaders and condemn ICE’s actions, but even if this helps people find their people and take a small part in fighting fascism, then that’s cool, too,” she told the outlet.
Tech professionals are finding their voices and beginning to express their views on the role of technology in the divisive political situation in the US.
For example, Nikhil Thorat, an engineer at AI firm Anthropic, wrote on X that in his opinion, events on the 7th of January showed that the government lacked basic humanity.
He believes that “the next five years are going to look a lot different because of technology. Yet our heads are buried in the sand, and we’re losing our way.”
So far, none of the CEOs of major technology companies has made any public statements on the incident.
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