Top leaders in Silicon Valley have expressed outrage in the aftermath of the fatal shooting of Alex Pretti, who was killed by immigration agents on a Minneapolis street, Minnesota, on January 24.
Apple CEO Tim Cook told employees in a memo — first reported by Bloomberg — that he has "had a good conversation with the President this week" and that "this is a time for de-escalation".
Videos have emerged showing a scuffle between Border Patrol agents and the 37-year-old nurse, who worked in the intensive care unit at the Veterans Affairs hospital, shortly before the shooting.
Former Meta Platforms AI chief scientist and Turing Award winner Yann LeCun, who is based in Paris, posted “murderers” on X, accompanied by video footage of Pretti’s death, while venture capitalist Vinod Khosla posted “macho ICE vigilantes running amuck empowered by a conscious-less administration”.
OpenAI CEO Sam Altman, who won Trump’s heart when he announced the Stargate Project in January last year, wrote in an internal Slack message to employees: "What’s happening with ICE is going too far. There is a big difference between deporting violent criminals and what’s happening now, and we need to get the distinction right.”
Dario Amodei, Anthropic’s CEO, called the events in Minnesota a “horror” in a social media post. He said: "Given the horror we're seeing in Minnesota, its emphasis on the importance of preserving democratic values and rights at home is particularly relevant.”
Reddit co-founder Alexis Ohanian has also weighed in: “ICE shot a man in the back while he was restrained. We need our leaders to lead right now — deescalate.”
Jeff Dean, chief scientist at Google’s DeepMind, commented on Pretti’s killing on X: “Every person regardless of political affiliation should be denouncing this.”
The tech executives are joining a wider group of engineers and other technology workers who have signed an open letter on ICEout.tech, a community participation website, condemning the violence in Minnesota.
On the evening of the shooting, US First Lady Melania Trump and film director Brett Ratner held a private screening of their upcoming documentary, Melania, at the White House. About 70 VIP guests were present, including some from the tech industry.
President Donald Trump said his administration was “going to de-escalate a little bit” in Minnesota. “Bottom line, it was terrible. Both of them were terrible,” he said in a Fox News interview. In early January, Renee Good was fatally shot by an immigration officer, followed by Pretti later in the month.
Leaders of most major tech companies have refrained from publicly backing the administration’s mass-deportation efforts, with the exception of the owner of X, Elon Musk, who has posted in support of immigration agents on his social media platform.
