Since Donald Trump returned to the White House in January, the biggest names in tech mostly fell in line with the new regime, attending dinners with officials, heaped praise on the administration, presented the president of expensive giftsand pleaded for Trump’s permission to sell theirs products to China. It was basically business as usual for Silicon Valley last year, even as the administration ignored a wide range of constitutional norms and tried to impose arbitrary fees on everyone from chip exports on worker visas for high-skilled immigrants working in tech companies.

But after a ICE agent An unarmed US citizen, Renee Nicole Good, was shot and killed in broad daylight in Minneapolis last weekseveral tech leaders have begun speaking out publicly about the Trump administration’s tactics. It included prominent researchers at Google and Anthropic, who denounced the killing as senseless and immoral. The richest and most powerful CEOs in technology have remained silent as ICE floods the streets of America, but now some researchers and engineers who work for them have chosen to break ranks.

More than 150 tech workers have so far signed a petition asking their company CEOs to call the White House, demand that ICE leave US cities, and speak out publicly against the agency’s new violence. Anne Diemer, a human resources consultant and former Stripe employee who organized the petition, says that workers at Meta, Google, Amazon, OpenAI, TikTok, Spotify, Salesforce, Linkedin, and Rippling are among the signatories. The group plans to make the list public once they reach 200 signatories.

“I think a lot of tech people feel like they can’t talk,” Diemer told WIRED. “I want tech leaders to call the leaders of the country and condemn the actions of ICE, but even if it helps people find their people and has a small part in the fight against fascism, then that’s cool too.”

Nikhil Thorat, an engineer at Anthropic, said in a long post on X that killing Good “triggered something” in him. “A mother was shot on the street by ICE, and the government didn’t have the decency to do a scripted condolence,” he wrote. Thorat added that the moral foundation of modern society is “infected, and deteriorating,” and the country is living through a “cosplay” of Nazi Germany, a time when people were also silent out of fear.

Jonathan Frankle, chief AI scientist at Databricks, added a “+1” to Thorat’s post. Shrisha Radhakrishna, chief technology and chief product officer of the real estate platform Opendoor, responded that what happened to Good “is not normal. It is immoral. Other users who identified themselves as employees of OpenAI and Anthropic also responded in support of Thorat.

Shortly after Good was shot, Jeff Dean, an early employee of Google and graduate of the University of Minnesota who is now the chief scientist of Google DeepMind and Google Research, began to re-share posts with his 400,000 X followers criticizing the immigration tactics of the Trump administration, including one outlining the circumstances in which lethal police force is unjustified with police in action.

He quickly assessed himself. “This is absolutely not okay, and we cannot be numb to the repeated instances of illegal and unconstitutional actions of government agencies,” Dean wrote in an X post on January 10. “The recent days are terrible.” He linked a video of a teenager—identified as a US citizen—being violently arrested at a Target in Richfield, Minnesota.

In response to US vice president JD Vance EXPRESS of X Good tried to run over an ICE agent with his car, Aaron Levie, the CEO of cloud storage company Box, responded, “Why did he shoot after he was completely out of harm’s way (2nd and 3rd shot)? Why didn’t he just walk away from the car instead of standing in front of it?” He added a screenshot of the a Justice Department web page outlines best practices for law enforcement officers interacting with motor vehicle suspects.