Although many tech workers spoke out against President Donald Trump’s policies during his first term, Silicon Valley’s rank and file has been quieter over the past year as their bosses curry favor with his administration. But that may be changing following the killings in Minneapolis.

Last week, after the killing of Good, over 200 Silicon Valley employees published a letter urging tech leaders to use their platforms to call for ICE’s removal from U.S. cities. As of Tuesday, following the killing of Pretti, the letter has more than 450 signatories, including workers from Google, Amazon and TikTok.

The letter argues that tech leaders have a unique ability to influence Trump. “Today we’re calling on our CEOs to pick up the phone,” the letter reads. It also demands that tech companies end their contracts with ICE.

The hundreds of staffers who signed the letter make up a small fraction of Silicon Valley. But the letter is the first major organized protest from the tech world against Trump in years—and a sign that what was once a loud, progressive bloc may be stirring back to life.

“For a lot of people who’ve tried to keep their heads down, the sheer horror of what’s happening on our streets has shocked them into realizing they have to say something,” says Pete Warden, a startup founder and former Google engineer who signed the letter.

Shifting Times

During the first Trump administration, many Big Tech employees reacted with outrage to his policies, especially on immigration. Google co-founder Sergey Brin, for example, protested Trump’s Muslim ban at San Francisco Airport in 2017.
But when President Biden took office, many Silicon Valley leaders became by his posture toward Big Tech. Many tech leaders went on to pour money into Trump’s 2024 campaign and then sought closer ties to him after his victory.

Mike Brock, a former executive at Block who now writes a political Substack, says that before the election, “the entire managerial class of Silicon Valley well understood that if Donald Trump won, there was going to need to be a kneeling.” He adds that over the past year, tech workers have stopped speaking out because “they know they’ll lose their job.”

Last year, many stories were written about Silicon Valley’s , as shown by leaders like Marc Andreessen and Elon Musk. But Warden says many actual workers in the Bay Area have kept their left-leaning politics. “I hear from a lot of people in private that they’re appalled by what’s happening, but unlike during Trump’s first term, they don’t feel safe or secure enough to speak out,” he says.

Meanwhile, tech tools have become increasingly central to Trump’s approach to overhauling parts of the federal bureaucracy via the Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE), targeting undocumented migrants, and developing weapons of war. ICE uses facial recognition to surveil those without legal status and monitor public speech. AWS (Amazon Web Services) provides data storage services. In October, Apple and Google apps that alerted people when ICE agents were nearby following pressure from Attorney General Pam Bondi. And last week, ICE asked tech companies to provide information about “commercial Big Data and Ad Tech” products that would “directly support investigative activities.”

Deaths in Minneapolis Spark Outrage

But video footage of the deaths of Good and Pretti—which appeared to contradict the accounts of federal officials—pushed some tech leaders to speak up publicly. On Saturday, said it was “time for all Americans” to stand against ICE. Jeff Dean, chief scientist at Google DeepMind, called Pretti’s killing “absolutely shameful,” while Yann LeCun : “murderers.”

Warden says the outcry from leaders gave cover to tech employees, and he’s spoken with several colleagues who haven’t signed the letter yet but plan to. “It hasn’t been possible to talk about any of this at work because you never knew if you’d be fired,” he says. “But now, seeing industry leaders like Jeff Dean take a stand, I hope this will be the seed for more actions going forward.”

White House spokeswoman Abigail Jackson to the letter by telling The Washington Post that “ICE officers act heroically” and that those criticizing ICE are “simply doing the bidding of criminal illegal aliens.”

Warden says he fears retaliation for speaking out, especially from VCs who might not want to fund his startup, Moonshine AI. “By speaking out, I could potentially be seen as a problematic founder, which might hurt or kill my company,” he says. “But compared to the risks people in Minneapolis take every day, that seems pretty small in the grand scheme of things.”