Keep your head down. Compartmentalize. Don’t make trouble.
That’s what many tech workers are taking their CEOs’ strategic silence to mean, amid an immigration crackdown across the US by the Trump administration’s Department of Homeland Security. Widespread violence by federal agents has sparked protests in Minneapolis and across the country. One month after an ICE agent shot and killed Renee Nicole Good, and two weeks after Border Patrol agents shot and killed Alex Pretti, the majority of tech CEOs have remained tight-lipped. Internally, workers from several companies describe a culture of silence and fear — and trepidation over what kind of future they’re helping to build.
The Verge spoke with tech workers at giants like Microsoft, YouTube, and Google, as well as tech companies in specific industries, like biometric verification firm CLEAR and medical device / healthcare company Abbott. Most described the same feeling of being told to stick to the corporate mission, whether outright or not, and feeling fearful for their jobs if they were to stick a toe out of line. Microsoft, Google, and Abbott did not provide a comment. CLEAR’s chief privacy officer, Lynn Haaland, told The Verge in a statement, “We do not work with ICE and never have, full stop.”
Many also described an eerie lack of acknowledgment in town hall meetings and public messaging from their companies. Internal forums and messaging platforms at the companies were also often devoid of mentions, besides a number of posts viewed by The Verge on Microsoft’s internal forum, Viva Engage. Some of the posts in a political discussion channel mentioned the intensifying protests in Minneapolis, ICE’s actions and victims, and Donald Trump’s administration. Posts in a different channel asked for actionable guidance on what to do in case of ICE detention and which documents the company recommends people perpetually carry on their person.
“The dissent I’ve seen is like a whisper,” said one employee who works on Azure at Microsoft, who requested anonymity for fear of retaliation, adding that people are afraid to speak out publicly and not sure who to trust internally. “It’s a fear-based culture right now.”
Although federal agents have killed at least eight people so far in 2026 and public protests are intensifying, chief executives at companies like Google, Meta, Microsoft, Apple, Amazon, AWS, and OpenAI have stayed radio silent in terms of public statements. Privately, Apple CEO Tim Cook and OpenAI CEO Sam Altman reportedly sent internal memos to staff about the situation, both calling for deescalation and expressing their beliefs that President Trump would rise to the occasion. Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei briefly spoke publicly, mentioning in a NBC interview that the company does not have contracts with ICE, and he posted on X about “the horror we’re seeing in Minnesota” and “the importance of preserving democratic values and rights at home.”
It’s a far cry from resistance efforts in Big Tech years back. In 2018, Microsoft workers presented leadership with a petition protesting the company’s ICE contracts, signed by about 500 Microsoft employees. That same year, thousands of Google workers successfully protested the company’s “Project Maven” partnership with the Pentagon, including about 4,000 Googler signatures on a petition. Tech companies’ responses (or lack thereof) to ICE’s recent actions are also a significant departure from their statements in 2018, and from their statements and financial commitments to the Black Lives Matter movement after George Floyd’s murder in 2020.
Meanwhile, most tech leaders have attempted to ingratiate themselves with Trump since he resumed office, donating to his inauguration fund or the main pro-Trump super PAC, dining with him at the White House, and putting out public statements praising the administration’s views on tech and AI. Many of them have also significantly increased their collaborations with the government, either putting out products specifically designed for use by military, defense, and intelligence agencies — like Anthropic’s Claude Gov or OpenAI’s ChatGPT Gov — or continuing or expanding their contracts with DHS, ICE, and other agencies focused on the immigration crackdown, such as Palantir. A grassroots movement aiming to send a signal to the Trump administration over anti-immigrant actions calls for consumers to boycott Microsoft, Amazon, OpenAI, and more.
An employee at YouTube, who requested anonymity for fear of retaliation, said, “I am personally frustrated that companies have cozied up to Trump, told their workers to just kind of shut up and focus on the mission, and not make any distinctions about what the company actually stands for at this moment in time. Are you on the side of democracy? Are you on the side of terrorizing our populace? Are you on the side of ripping people from their families, arbitrary deportations, arbitrary detentions, multiple deaths at the hands of ICE now? Are you in favor of that? Where do you stand?”
A recent petition signed by more than 1,000 Google employees dictates demands for leadership to acknowledge and “publicly call for urgent government responses to this crisis,” for the company to host an “emergency Q&A session for workers” regarding Google’s DHS, CBP, and military contracts, and to take steps to protect workers, whether they be cafeteria workers or data center employees.
Another petition that began circulating after Good’s death — created by the organization ICEout.tech and titled “Tech demands ICE out of our cities” — highlights the fact that when Trump wanted to send the national guard to San Francisco in October, tech industry leaders reportedly pressured him into backing off. Petition signatories are calling for tech CEOs to do the same thing now. The three demands: “Call the White House and demand that ICE leave our cities,” “cancel all company contracts with ICE,” and “speak out publicly against ICE’s violence.” The petition has garnered more than 2,000 public signatures to date, listing employees at Palantir, Microsoft, Google, Meta, Amazon, AWS, Apple, Anthropic, OpenAI, Salesforce, LinkedIn, TikTok, Spotify, Figma, Adobe, Mozilla, Stripe, Block, and more.
“There has been a very perceptible shift in how people are talking about what’s happening,” Lisa Conn, one of the organizers of the ICEout.tech petition, said in an interview with The Verge, detailing tech workers’ concerns about ICE tactics and discrepancies. She said the petition started being shared in Signal groups and WhatsApp chats and has spread quickly in recent weeks, with even business leaders expressing their concerns about a potential economic crisis stemming from ICE’s actions. “When the government starts killing people on the streets, it’s really bad for business,” she said, adding, “This is not hypothetical. This is how economies hollow out.”
The overall lack of tech CEO statements and public action didn’t stop some non-C-suite leaders and staffers from speaking out: Google’s chief scientist and Gemini lead Jeff Dean posted on X that Pretti’s killing was “absolutely shameful” and that “every person regardless of political affiliation should be denouncing this.” OpenAI’s head of global business, James Dyett, posted on X, “There is far more outrage from tech leaders over a wealth tax than masked ICE agents terrorizing communities and executing civilians in the streets. Tells you what you need to know about the values of our industry.”
“Internally, people are really hush-hush,” the YouTube employee said. “They’ve gotten the point that leaders don’t want them to be bringing in the outside world. They want [them] to focus on their narrow definition of the job.” He added, “Is it still okay to be an employee in technology right now? Is the future we’re building towards bright, or is it dystopian?” He also said that the message he’d heard “loud and clear” from YouTube leadership was that staffers should remain focused on the company mission.
Another Google employee said that she feels that the state of the world has been acknowledged in some of the meetings she’s attended and that she was heartened to see Dean’s public statement. “We’re also a company that’s made up of a lot of immigrants with various statuses,” she said. “I can imagine being somebody that is here on one of those H-1B visas feeling very vulnerable about talking too much because it’s like we’ve got secret police, it feels like, out in the world.”
The Microsoft Azure employee said she and many colleagues had openly discussed their anti-ICE stance in person and that Microsoft’s stated mission — “to empower every person and every organization on the planet to achieve more” — was completely at odds with the company’s actions. It was also at odds, she said, with why she and her colleagues had joined Microsoft in the first place.
“I’ve hit my limit of what I’m willing to tolerate,” the Microsoft Azure employee said. “I already knew that I was uncomfortable with what was happening — I know Microsoft works with ICE, I know GitHub has contracts with ICE and they’ve had those for a long time, and I’ve never been okay with that — but I still try to believe that the good that I’m doing is greater than the horrors that are a part of this. But there’s a limit to what we can put up with. And I’ve hit my limit.”
A second Microsoft employee told The Verge that internal portals she had combed through had zero acknowledgment of the situation, and that all updates seem to be focused on the company’s AI priorities for the year or new chips. She said within her team and her branch of the organization, there’s been no mention of what’s going on, even in town halls, and that “it feels like there’s no space to talk about it.”
“I’m not surprised, I’m just wildly disappointed,” the Microsoft employee said. “I haven’t been able to think about work very well.” She brought up the fact that some employees must be located in, or have ties to, Minneapolis. “To not hear anything about how we’re supporting those people, even just a nod to it like, ‘Hey, we have … resources you can reach out to in case of mental health’ … It really has been nothing.”
An employee at medtech giant Abbott who works out of one of the company’s offices near Minneapolis said she’s felt supported by her direct manager, but higher up the chain, there’s been no acknowledgement of what’s going on, including by CEO Robert B. Ford. She said staff received a generic HR email about mental health resources with no acknowledgment of the situation, and that there’s been no stated protocol for how to proceed if ICE shows up at the office or at their home. Like other tech workers, she described in-person office conversations with coworkers she trusts as the main form of resistance at the moment. She described a constant state of hypervigilance and “keeping your head on a swivel,” since ICE vehicles are “everywhere” within the community.
“Based on my experiences here in Minneapolis, I think basically every building, no matter what kind of building you are … should have a plan in place for if ICE is spotted on your property,” the Abbott employee said. “I’ve been pretty shocked that there’s not been any communications about, ‘This is our plan on what to do.’ And we have plenty of workers in the building that are people of color, and the experience we know here is they’ll grab US citizens too, so it doesn’t really matter what your citizen status is.”
An employee at CLEAR, which works closely in tandem with the Transportation Security Administration at airports, described the company as being “very fear-based” with “a lot of intimidation” and calls to “fall in line and accept and say yes to everything and not really question too much.”
“I don’t necessarily trust that the technology that we have, that the resources we have, will be used for something good,” the employee said. “I just don’t really believe that having people’s biometrics and access to personal information based off of the way their body moves — I don’t trust that that wouldn’t be used for immigration verification.”
Like the other workers The Verge spoke with, the CLEAR employee was fearful of ruffling feathers — but felt leadership’s affinity for the Trump administration and lack of response was not just tone-deaf, but also potentially dangerous.
CLEAR’s Haaland said in her statement that the company “has one mission: to deliver secure, seamless experiences for our members in airports and beyond. We do that by making data security the highest priority and ensuring our members always maintain complete control of their information.”
“I work at Google; it’s the forefront of AI,” the YouTube employee said. “I grew up with the internet being this information superhighway, this tool of empowerment, and this amazing equalizer. Things have been nuanced and not exactly all a utopia, but I continue to believe that technology is empowering. But I see what’s happening with the administration, and all the coziness between tech companies and the administration, and I wonder, ‘What future are we building towards now?’ People are scared about what AI is going to become. The association with Trump — does that mean AI is going to become a tool of state repression? What are we really working on? What is the future that tech is shaping right now?”
The Microsoft Azure employee said she feels like a lot of tech workers are wearing a mask, smiling and going along with the protocol, but that in person, they can be more honest with those that they trust in the office. She said she found a Post-it note — which was viewed by The Verge — hidden in a meeting room that read, “I feel completely useless here, how ’bout you?”
“I think that speaks to the culture of at least Microsoft, but I think it’s happening at all of the tech companies right now,” she said.
