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,” Hoffman wrote. “We can’t shrink away and just hope the crisis will fade. We know now that hope without action is not a strategy — it’s an invitation for Trump to trample whatever he can see, including our own business and security interests.” He said he’s been encouraged to see more tech leaders speaking out, saying: “it’s a good start to something America needs much more of right now.” Techcrunch event Boston, MA | June 23, 2026 “Whichever candidates you may have supported in the past — or even if (like many of my friends in Silicon Valley) you don’t usually do politics — you almost surely did not want this,” he wrote. Sam Altman, CEO at OpenAI OpenAI CEO Sam Altman had publicly opposed Trump’s policies during his first term, but has changed his tune in the new administration as his company has struck deals to develop AI infrastructure for the U.S. government, including the gargantuan $500 billion Stargate project. In the days following Pretti’s death, Altman addressed OpenAI staff in an internal Slack message, which was reported by The New York Times. “What’s happening with ICE is going too far. There is a big difference between deporting violent criminals and what’s happening now, and we need to get the distinction right,” he said. “President Trump is a very strong leader, and I hope he will rise to this moment and unite the country.” Altman added, “We didn’t become super woke when that was popular, we didn’t start talking about masculine corporate energy when that was popular, and we are not going to make a lot of performative statements now about safety or politics or anything else. But we are going to continue to try to figure out how to actually do the right thing as best as we can.” Dario Amodei, CEO at Anthropic In an NBC interview, anchor Tom Llamas asked Dario Amodei about his views on defense in relation to current events. The anchor pointed out that Anthropic has a contract with the U.S. Department of Defense, and that it has partnered with Palantir — which has supplied technology to ICE — on projects for that agency. First, Amodei reaffirmed that Anthropic does not have any contracts with ICE, despite its relationship with the Defense Department, and emphasized his concern about “the need to protect democracies against autocracies” like China and Russia. “I’m a big believer in, carefully, with guardrails, arming democracies to defend against these countries,” Amodei said, adding that these values persist in the context of internal American politics. “We need to be really careful about making sure democracies are worth defending. We need to defend our own democratic values at home,” he said. “I believe some of the things we’ve seen in the last few days