Silicon Valley on Minnesota shooting: ‘only a matter of time before they show up in force here’

This is the third shooting incident by a federal agent in the city this month and the second fatal. Meanwhile, similar shooting incidents occurred in other parts of the country.

The death of Alex Peretti, 37, who worked as a nurse at a Veterans Administration hospital in Minnesota, appears to have been a turning 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 away from their traditional Democratic stance, Saturday’s killing by Border Patrol agents sparked a wave of criticism.

“I wonder how the tech people who are eager for this system, including some of my friends and former venture capital partners, justify these atrocities,” John O’Farrell, general partner at venture capital firm a16z, said on X. “Just the latest in a year of atrocities. Is all the cryptocurrency and AI money in the world really worth this?”

Yann LeCun, a senior AI scientist at Meta, tweeted the word “murderers” while responding to the shooting footage.

“This video is too painful to watch, yet we have to burn it into our memories,” wrote Kath Kurivick, a product manager at Google Labs. “The basic truth here is ‘they already disarmed him.’ Then they executed him. It’s shameful. No matter which side you’re on, what happened today is unacceptable.”

In a later post, she compared ICE to Adolf Hitler’s paramilitary forces, describing it as an “outlaw enforcement arm” that operates outside democratic constraints.

“I can’t go to Minneapolis. It’s only a matter of time before they show up in force here in the Bay Area,” Kurevik warned, as she listed the steps she was taking to “help my neighbors prepare.”

Here are other tech leaders speaking:

Paul Graham, co-founder of Y Combinator: “If someone had predicted before the last election that if Trump won, federal officers would shoot Americans in the streets, it would have been dismissed as alarmist.”

David Lieb, general partner at Y Combinator: “I think each side will see what they want to see. I know what I see, which is another citizen being killed for no good reason. What I hope everyone can agree on: Our government is deliberately choosing to put citizens in this position. It has to stop. They are working for us.”

Jeff Dean, chief scientist at Google DeepMind and Google Research: “This is absolutely shameful. Agents of a federal agency needlessly escalate, then execute an unarmed citizen whose crime appears to be using his cell phone camera. Every person, regardless of political affiliation, should condemn this.”

Zach Tratar, founder of Embra: “I’ve been in the tech industry for 15 years. The tech leaders who *support* ICE? They’re the same people everyone knows as narcissistic sociopaths. It’s almost a 100% success rate. I think it makes sense. To agree to this, you have to lack a sense of humanity.”

But technology entrepreneur Joe Lonsdale, who co-founded Palantir, echoed the Trump administration’s claims that the problem lies with the people protesting the anti-immigration crackdown, not the customers themselves.

He added: “This is an organized and illegal rebellion, and it must be treated as such.” “Echoes of the Whiskey Rebellion. If the right had been doing this, it would have been a threat in the news, and the left would have put it down. But the right of the Republican Party doesn’t know how to use power and discipline.”