Big Tech’s government entanglement

TL;DR: Tech workers are demanding their companies sever ties with ICE, arguing that the industry has helped accelerate immigration enforcement at scale. The backlash is part of a broader reckoning over how Big Tech’s political alignment, data tools, and content moderation policies increasingly enable government power—from surveillance and encryption access to control over the information we see.

What happened: More than 450 employees from companies including Google, Amazon, Meta, Salesforce, and OpenAI have signed an open letter urging their CEOs to contact the White House and tell ICE to leave US cities. The letter also demands that tech companies end ICE contracts that have enabled large-scale enforcement actions over the past year. Over the weekend, federal immigration agents killed 37-year-old US citizen Alex Pretti in Minneapolis, underscoring the urgency of tech workers’ demands.

This push from rank-and-file workers comes amid a broader pattern of tech companies—and key tech leaders—working closely with the Trump administration. For decades, governments have relied on tech platforms and infrastructure to advance questionable policy goals (see: telecom companies complying with NSA surveillance requests, as exposed by whistleblower Edward Snowden). But under the Trump administration, the connection between the tech industry and the administration’s political aims has become more apparent. It’s not just data analytics firms like Palantir working with ICE—reports show that ICE is now looking to buy commercial big data and ad tech tools originally built to target consumers.

How we got here: Big Tech’s alignment with President Donald Trump was on full display at last year’s inauguration, when figures like Mark Zuckerberg and Jeff Bezos stood behind the 47th president. The tech sector was also one of the top donor blocs to the Trump campaign in the 2024 election.

Over the past year, we’ve seen how that relationship plays out in practice. ICE has relied on a vast web of tech tools—license plate readers, facial recognition systems, and warrantless phone location tracking—to more quickly identify and detain people, dramatically increasing the agency’s speed and reach.

And it’s not just ICE: Over the weekend, Microsoft confirmed that it handed customer encryption keys to the FBI, allowing law enforcement to access data that was otherwise protected by end-to-end security. While encrypted data is often marketed as inaccessible even to the companies that host it, governments can still gain access through legal orders. Previously, many tech companies refused these orders. But now, it’s clear they're more willing to play ball, with big tech companies like Apple and Google regularly complying with government requests for user data.

The issue also extends beyond law enforcement and surveillance to fears of censorship and algorithmic throttling on social media, now a primary way many people consume news and engage in political discussion. After TikTok’s US spinoff was finalized last week—with several Trump-aligned investors, including Oracle cofounder Larry Ellison, now holding significant stakes—users in the US quickly reported widespread outages, trouble logging in, an inability to post videos, and content stuck “under review.” This prompted speculation about whether the disruptions were merely technical or more deliberate suppression during heated political debate. It wouldn’t be without precedent: Platforms including Meta, TikTok, and X have previously acknowledged throttling or removing political content, sometimes unevenly and with little transparency. How these companies act now, and whether they're held to task, could have big implications for how tech continues to enable the government—and what it all means for all of us. —WK