Silicon Valley Tech Workers Are Campaigning to Get ICE Out of US Cities
The first Trump administration, and the tech industry that stood on it, both look interesting by the day.
Here's one example: in 2017, when President Trump issued a series of executive orders that imposed a travel ban on foreigners from certain (mainly Muslim-majority) countries, people from all over the United States strongly protested the policy. They included some of tech's most elite: Google co-founder Sergey Brin, who participated in a demonstration at the San Francisco airport; Amazon founder Jeff Bezos, who wrote a company-wide email outlining “legal options” Amazon was considering to fight the ban; and Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg, who took to Instagram to describe his own family's immigrant roots.
How times have changed. On Saturday, hours after federal agents shot and killed ICU nurse Alex Pretti on the streets of Minneapolis, several prominent tech executives attended a private White House screening of Melaniaa documentary is being released by (of course) Amazon MGM Studios. The timing was not lost on the group of Silicon Valley workers who recently launched ICEout.techessentially an open letter to their bosses. The letter, placed next Renee Nicole Good's murder earlier this month, has now been signed by more than 1,000 tech employees. Those workers, who come from across the spectrum of Big Tech companies and startups, are demanding that governors use their power to demand Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents leave US cities, that they cancel corporate contracts with the agency, and that they speak out publicly about ICE's violent and deadly tactics.
Labor-led demands like those were common during Trump 1.0, when tech workers at the world's biggest companies often spoke out — internally and externally — about the brutality of the U.S. administration and the role of industry in facilitating or tempering its worst policies. Today, however, a movement like ICEout.tech feels revolutionary: Tech workers have been remarkably quiet over the past year, as the power dynamics within their companies have tended to favor management against frontline workers. Meanwhile, the executives who lead those companies have been busy kissing the ring –over dinner at the White House or with foreign expensive documentaries that no one watches – at every opportunity.
Is the dam finally breaking? This week, the leaders of Silicon Valley, including Anthropic heads Dario and Daniela Amodi, OpenAI CEO Sam Altman, and Apple CEO Tim Cook finally spoke out about the scandalous overreach of ICE. It's a start, but I wanted to know more about what was happening in tech circles, and where the industry is going from here. So I asked two early ICEout.tech signatories, Moonshine AI CEO Pete Warden and Gatherround co-founder Lisa Conn, to sit down for an emergency episode of The Great Interview.
Here is our conversation.
This interview has been edited for length and clarity.
KATIE DRUMMOND: Pete and Lisa, thank you so much for joining us. I'm glad you can be here.
PETE WARDEN: It's great to be here.
LISA CONN: Thanks for having us.
You both work in the tech industry, and you have for a long time. You are among the many who signed the ICEout.tech letter that is now widespread in Silicon Valley.
That movement and the website actually launched earlier this month after the tragic shooting of Renee Nicole Good. What made you decide to put your name on this letter? At this point in the tech industry, putting your name on a document like this is no small thing.
Connection: I signed the letter for a bunch of reasons. I think one of the primary ones is that it feels like we are going into an economic and governance crisis when the government starts killing people in the streets and then denying or recreating what is clearly documented. It's really a bad situation.
