The tech community is speaking out after federal agents carrying out President Donald Trump’s immigration crackdown shot and killed a man in Minneapolis on Saturday.
It marked the third shooting by a federal agent in the city this month and the second deadly one. Meanwhile, similar shootings in other parts of the country have occurred.
The death of 37-year-old Alex Pretti, who worked as a nurse at Veterans Administration hospital in Minnesota, appeared to have been a tipping point in the backlash against the Trump administration’s immigration and deportation policy.
While many in the tech sector initially welcomed Trump’s embrace of deregulation and cryptocurrencies or backed off their traditional Democratic stance, Saturday’s killing at the hands of Border Patrol officers set off a wave of criticism.
“Wondering how the eager tech enablers of this regime, including some of my former VC friends and partners, are rationalizing this atrocity,” said John O’Farrell, general partner at venture capital firm a16z, on X. “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, Yann LeCun, simply posted “Murderers” while reacting to footage of the shooting.
Kath Korevec, director of product at Google Labs, wrote, “This video is too painful to watch, and yet we have to burn it into our memories. ‘They had already disarmed him’ is the key fact here. Then they executed him. It’s shameful. No matter what side you’re on, what happened today is unacceptable.”
In a follow-up post, 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 show up in force here in the Bay Area,” Korevec warned, while listing steps she is taking “to help my neighbors prepare.”
Here are other tech leaders speaking out:
Paul Graham, 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.”
David Leib, 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 choosing to put citizens in this situation. It needs to stop. They work for us.”
Jeff Dean, chief scientist at Google DeepMind 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 denouncing this.”
Zach Tratar, founder of Embra: “I’ve been in tech 15 years. The tech leaders who are *supporting* ICE? They’re the exact folks 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.”
But tech entrepreneur Joe Lonsdale, who cofounded Palantir, echoed the Trump administration’s claims that the problem is people protesting the immigration crackdown, not the agents themselves.
“This is an organized illegal insurgency, and should be treated as such,” he posted. “Echoes of whiskey rebellion. If it was the right doing this, it would be back to back as a threat on the news, and the left would put it down. But the GOP right does not know how to use power and discipline.”
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