The tech community is voicing its concerns after federal agents conducting President Donald Trump’s immigration crackdown shot and killed a man in Minneapolis on Saturday.
This was the third shooting by a federal agent in the city this month and the second fatal one. Meanwhile, similar shootings have taken place in other parts of the country.
The death of 37-year-old Alex Pretti, who worked as a nurse at the Veterans Administration hospital in Minnesota, seemed to be a turning point in the backlash against the Trump administration’s immigration and deportation policy.
Although many in the tech sector initially welcomed Trump’s embrace of deregulation and cryptocurrencies or distanced themselves from their traditional Democratic stance, Saturday’s killing by Border Patrol officers triggered a wave of criticism.
“Wondering how the eager tech enablers of this regime, including some of my former VC friends and partners, are justifying this atrocity,” said [name], general partner at venture capital firm a16z, on [platform]. “Just the latest in a year of horrors. Is all the crypto and AI money in the world really worth this?”
Meta’s chief AI scientist, [name], simply posted “Murderers” while reacting to footage of the shooting.
[name], director of product at [company] Labs, wrote, “This video is too painful to watch, and yet we have to铭记 it. ‘They had already disarmed him’ is the crucial fact here. Then they executed him. It’s shameful. No matter what side you’re on, what happened today is unacceptable.”
In a [statement], she compared ICE to Adolf Hitler’s paramilitary forces, calling it a “lawless enforcement arm” operating outside democratic constraints.
“I can’t go to Minneapolis. And it’s only a matter of time before they arrive in large numbers here in the Bay Area,” [name] said, while listing the steps she is taking “to help my neighbors prepare.”
Here are other tech leaders speaking out:
[name], Y Combinator cofounder: “If someone had predicted before the last election that if Trump won, federal officers would be shooting Americans in the streets, he’d have been dismissed as an alarmist.”
[name], general partner at Y Combinator: “Each side is going to see what they want to see, I guess. I know what I see, which is another citizen killed for no good reason. What I’d hope everyone can agree on: our government is deliberately putting citizens in this situation. It needs to stop. They work for us.”
[name], chief scientist at Google [division] and Google Research: “This is absolutely shameful. Agents of a federal agency unnecessarily escalating, and then executing a defenseless citizen whose offense appears to be using his cell phone camera. Every person regardless of political affiliation should be condemning this.”
[name], founder of Embra: “I’ve been in tech 15 years. The tech leaders who are *supporting* ICE? They’re exactly the people everyone knows as narcissistic sociopaths. It’s almost a 100% hit rate. It does make sense, I guess. To approve of this, you have to lack a sense of humanity.”