Tech workers speak out on ICE surge

Jessica Guynn

USA TODAY

'I’m really sick of ICE, how about you?' AnnE Diemer, a San Francisco human resources consultant, posted on LinkedIn, referring to U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement.

A week later, more than 300 tech workers had signed a public petition she drafted, urging their employers – some of the world’s most powerful companies, from Amazon to Google – to use their economic and political clout to press President Donald Trump to stop the aggressive immigration enforcement that resulted in the fatal shooting of Renee Nicole Good, an unarmed mother of three, in Minneapolis.

'For months now, Trump has sent federal agents to our cities to criminalize us, our neighbors, friends, colleagues and family members,' the petition reads. 'From Minneapolis to Los Angeles to Chicago, we’ve seen armed and masked thugs bring reckless violence, kidnapping, terror and cruelty with no end in sight. This cannot continue, and we know the tech industry can make a difference.'

'We want our CEOs to be calling the White House and saying that ICE needs to get out,' Diemer, who used to work at tech company Stripe, told USA TODAY.

She pointed to the role Salesforce’s Marc Benioff and Nvidia’s Jensen Huang played in persuading the White House not to dispatch National Guard troops to her city in November.

'It worked in San Francisco,' Diemer said. 'I would really love for it to work in Minnesota right now.'

The public condemnation of ICE tactics is among the first stirrings of resistance inside tech companies where employee activism used to run strong.

After the fatal shooting of Good, early Google employee Jeff Dean, now chief scientist at DeepMind and Google Research, wrote on X: 'This is completely not okay, and we can’t become numb to repeated instances of illegal and unconstitutional action by government agencies. The recent days have been horrific.'

Nikhil Thorat, an engineer at Anthropic, said on X that Good’s killing had 'stirred something' in him.

'A mother was gunned down in the street by ICE, and the government doesn’t even have the decency to perform a scripted condolence,' he wrote.

For years, cubicle activists hailing from liberal-skewing tech centers agitated for change around the globe and inside their own companies, pressuring their employers over contracts with U.S. Customs and Border Protection and the Pentagon, and over their lack of progress on climate change and workforce diversity – even over Google’s handling of sexual harassment claims.

During Trump’s first term, legions of tech workers volunteered their time and skills, raised funds and even walked off the job to protest his policies – and their bosses listened. Google co-founder Sergey Brin showed up at a demonstration against the travel ban for Muslim nations during Trump’s first term and Google CEO Sundar Pichai joined thousands of employees during a walkout.

However, even before the changing of the guard in the White House, technology companies leery of political blowback in an increasingly polarized environment began steering clear of divisive issues such as immigration, racial justice and LGBTQ+ rights. And they’ve expected their employees to do the same.

With the rightward tilt in Silicon Valley, tech employees have kept largely quiet as some of the industry’s most powerful leaders lobby the administration and present Trump with lavish gifts while slashing policies and programs like diversity, equity and inclusion that the administration has sought to eliminate.

The tighter job market in tech has played a pivotal role in that silence, as have the limited legal rights of at-will employees who are not protected by the First Amendment guarantee of free speech and who have been told by their employers to leave their politics at the door.

The issue came to a head when tensions over the war in Gaza spilled into the workplace. In April 2024, Google employees held sit-ins at the company’s offices in New York and Sunnyvale, California, to protest a $1.2billion contract to provide the Israeli government with cloud computing and artificial intelligence services. The tech giant called the police. Then it fired some of the employees.

'Companies are being a little more sensitive about topics the administration is sensitive about, canceling the DEI programs and whatnot, and I think that has made folks afraid to speak out,' Diemer said. 'They don’t want to be in the next round of layoffs, they need their health insurance, and I get that. But I do think there are a lot of people who don’t agree with tech’s alignment with the administration and especially with the violence that ICE is perpetuating. And so I think that’s going to make more people speak up, especially when they see how many people are already speaking up.'

In condemning ICE tactics, these workers know they are taking professional and personal risks. Some signed the petition only to ask to have their names removed out of fear for their families’ safety, Diemer said.

Galen Panger, 40, a user experience researcher at YouTube, said he’s not an 'employee agitator' but he felt compelled to speak out despite the risks.

'Immigration enforcement is really important, but there’s right ways and wrong ways to go about it,' he said. 'We just can’t terrorize our citizens, murder our citizens on the street. Renee Good could have been my mom, and tomorrow Minneapolis-St. Paul could be San Francisco and the Peninsula.'

'What this letter is asking for that I signed is for these really big and important companies to do a little more,' Panger added. 'They don’t have to go out and poke the bear. They don’t have to go out and do things that are irresponsible. But they can use their access, they can use their economic might to do a little more and say ‘Let’s stop terrorizing our citizens.’'

With employees taking a stand, Diemer said she’s hopeful the petition is the start of a new wave of employee activism in Silicon Valley.

'I am so grateful for the folks who are taking the risk and putting their names out there,' she said. 'I thought this was going to be like a quick Google form type thing, and it seems like it can maybe be more than that and we can grow into something, and that would be really cool.'