Department of Justice subpoenas Minneapolis Mayor Frey and Minnesota Governor Walz
The Justice Department on Tuesday issued subpoenas to several Minnesota officials and began an investigation into whether they interfered with federal immigration operations in the state. (Scripps News)
scripps news
“I’m really tired of ICE. What about you?” AnnE Diemer, a human resources consultant in San Francisco, posted on LinkedIn.
A week later, more than 300 tech workers signed a public petition she drafted calling on their employers, some of the world’s most powerful companies, from Amazon to Google, to use their economic and political influence to pressure President Donald Trump to end the aggressive immigration crackdown that led to the shooting death of unarmed mother of three Renee Nicole Good.
“In recent months, President Trump has sent federal agents into our cities to criminalize us, our neighbors, friends, colleagues, and families. From Minneapolis to Los Angeles to Chicago, we have watched armed and masked thugs unleash reckless violence, kidnappings, terrorism, and endless brutality,” the petition reads. “This cannot continue. We know the technology industry can make a difference.”
“We want the CEOs to call the White House and say ICE needs to go,” Diemer, who worked at the tech company Stripe, said in an interview with USA TODAY.
She pointed to the role of Salesforce’s Marc Benioff and Nvidia’s Jensen Huang in persuading the White House not to send the National Guard to her hometown in November.
“It worked well in San Francisco,” Diemer said. “I really hope it works in Minnesota right now.”
Some in the tech industry are criticizing ICE
The public condemnation of ICE tactics was one of the first to spark resistance within technology companies, where employee movements were once popular.
After the shooting, Jeff Dean, an early Google employee and now a principal scientist at DeepMind and Google Research, wrote on the social media platform X: “The last few days have been awful.”
Nikhil Thorat, an engineer at Anthropic, told X that Goode’s murder “sparked something” in him.
“My mother was shot and killed on the street by ICE, and the government doesn’t even have the decency to offer scripted condolences,” he wrote.
Some people avoid divisive issues
Activists from the liberal tech center have been campaigning for change around the world and within their own companies for years, pressuring employers over contracts with U.S. Customs and Border Protection and the Department of Defense, climate change and workforce diversity, and a lack of progress on addressing sexual harassment at Google.
During President Trump’s first term, scores of tech workers volunteered their time and skills, held fundraisers and even quit their jobs to protest Trump’s policies, and their bosses listened. Google co-founder Sergey Brin showed up to demonstrate against President Trump’s travel ban on Muslim countries during his first term, and Google CEO Sundar Pichai joined thousands of employees in striking.
Even before the changing of the guard in the White House, technology companies, wary of inviting political headwinds in an increasingly polarized environment, began avoiding divisive issues like immigration, racial justice and gay rights. And they have expected the same from their employees.
The issue came to the fore when tensions over the war in Gaza spilled over into the workplace. Google employees staged sit-ins in April 2024 at the company’s offices in New York and Sunnyvale, California, to protest a $1.2 billion contract to provide cloud computing and artificial intelligence services to the Israeli government. The tech giant called the police. Then we fired some of them.
Silicon Valley’s shift to the right has left tech employees largely silent as some of the industry’s most powerful business leaders lobby the administration, showering President Trump with lavish gifts while cutting back on diversity, equity, and inclusion policies and programs that the administration has sought to eliminate.
The tight job market in the tech industry also plays a crucial role in this silence, as does the limited legal rights of free-will employees who are not protected by the First Amendment’s guarantee of free speech and are told by their employers to stay away from political activities.
“I think businesses are a little more sensitive about topics that the administration is sensitive to, like canceling DEI programs, and I think that’s making people afraid to speak up,” Diemer said. “They don’t want to get fired again, they need health insurance, and I understand that. But I think there are a lot of people who don’t agree with the collaboration between tech companies and the administration, especially the violence that ICE is perpetuating. So I think it’s going to encourage more people to speak out, especially when you see so many people already speaking out.”
Silicon Valley Activities 2.0?
We know that by condemning ICE’s tactics, these workers are taking professional and personal risks. Diemer said some people signed a petition asking only for their names to be removed because they feared for the safety of their families.
Galen Panger, 40, a user experience researcher at YouTube, said he is not an “employee agitator” but felt compelled to speak out despite the risks.
“Immigration enforcement is really important, but there’s a right way to do it and a wrong way to do it. You can’t terrorize the public, you can’t murder the public in the streets. Renee Good could have been my mother, tomorrow Minneapolis could have become San Francisco, and St. Paul could have become San Francisco and The Peninsula,” he told USA TODAY.
“What this letter that I signed is asking these really big, important companies to try a little harder. They don’t have to go out and poke the bear. They don’t have to go out and do something irresponsible. But they can use their access and use their economic power to do a little bit more and say, ‘Let’s stop terrorizing our people.'”
Diemer said he hopes the petition is the start of a new wave of employee activism in Silicon Valley, with employees from Microsoft to OpenAI standing up.
“I’m so grateful to those who took the risk of putting their names forward,” she said. “I thought this was going to be something like a simple Google Form, but it could probably be something more than that, and it could grow into something, and it could be really cool.”
