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,” Hoffma …