SAN FRANCISCO — After federal immigration agents killed Alex Pretti in Minneapolis, Google employees lit up the company’s internal message boards with calls for the company to respond.

On Friday, more than 800 employees called on management in a petition to be transparent about how Google’s technology supports federal immigration agencies and urged the company to stop doing business with those organizations. The petition said they were “appalled by the violence” and “paramilitary-style raids” by immigration agents, which they accused Google of aiding.

They also asked the company to take safety measures to protect employees after a reported attempt by Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents to enter the company’s campus in Cambridge, Massachusetts.

The petition signaled a revival of employee activism at Google and across Silicon Valley after years of relative calm. Tech workers, who have largely stayed quiet as executives cozied up to the Trump administration, are beginning to push some of the world’s biggest companies to pressure the White House to change its policies.

While signed by a fraction of the company’s roughly 190,000 workers, the new petition echoes turmoil at Google in 2018, after workers walked out over the company’s handling of sexual harassment and then protested its involvement in a Pentagon program that used artificial intelligence to improve drone strikes.

In the years since, Google’s management limited employees’ access to internal documents, scaled back all-hands meetings and cracked down on dissent. It fired 28 workers two years ago for protesting its cloud computing contract with the Israeli government.

As a result, some employees have become more hesitant to challenge management, said Matthew Tschiegg, an engineer on the cloud computing team who signed the petition. But many employees still believe in the company’s informal corporate motto: “Don’t be evil.”

Since President Donald Trump returned to the White House, Silicon Valley executives and investors have lined up to support the president with donations and policy commitments. Their solidarity created the perception that the tech industry had shifted from liberal to conservative.

But Pretti’s death helped show some cracks.

Sundar Pichai, Google’s CEO, hasn’t issued a public statement. Jeff Dean, chief scientist at Google’s DeepMind AI research lab, wrote in a social media post, “Every person regardless of political affiliation should be denouncing this.”

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This article originally appeared in The New York Times.

By Tripp Mickle/David Guttenfelder
c. 2026 The New York Times Company