Rift at influential Silicon Valley venture firm shows tech’s divide over ICE shooting

By Aditya Soni

Jan 26 (Reuters) – Heated political rhetoric over the fatal shooting of a U.S. citizen by immigration agents in Minneapolis on Saturday spilled into Silicon Valley as partners at an influential venture firm distanced themselves from a colleague who defended the killing.

The death of 37-year-old Alex Pretti was one of five shootings this month involving federal agents conducting immigration enforcement, including the fatal shooting of Minnesota woman Renee Good. At least six immigrants have died this month in federal immigration detention, an unusually rapid pace. 

The Pretti shooting has drawn anger across the U.S. political spectrum as the administration of Republican President Donald Trump backed the agents even as video evidence contradicted its version of events. 

The back-and-forth on social media highlights an ongoing political fracture at the heart of the U.S. tech industry where some executives have abandoned the sector’s longstanding reputation for progressive social values to publicly back Trump’s policies. 

After Khosla Ventures partner Keith Rabois said on social media on Saturday that law enforcement had not shot an innocent person and that illegal immigrants commit crimes daily, the firm’s founder, Vinod Khosla, and partner Ethan Choi both disavowed the comments. The firm is notable for having backed companies including OpenAI, DoorDash and Instacart. 

“ICE (Immigration and Customs Enforcement) personnel must have ice water running thru their veins to treat other human beings this way,” Khosla said in a post on X. “There is politics but humanity should transcend that,” Khosla added. 

Several other tech executives including Jeff Dean, chief scientist at Alphabet’s Google DeepMind AI lab, and Microsoft Chief Scientific Officer Eric Horvitz praised Pretti, who was an intensive-care nurse at a Veterans Affairs hospital.

FRACTURE IN SILICON VALLEY

Billionaire Elon Musk has led the charge to the politically conservative right, with hundreds of millions of dollars in campaign donations to Trump’s 2024 campaign and support for his anti-immigration moves. This has led to public clashes with the likes of LinkedIn co-founder Reid Hoffman, a major Democratic donor. 

Musk has not commented on the Pretti shooting, while Hoffman echoed Khosla’s message that humanity should transcend politics.

Wary of government retaliation, tech executives have spent the past year largely silent on policies impacting their businesses including the chaos surrounding the H-1B visa program and U.S tariffs.

Executives have instead sought to improve ties with Trump, contributing millions to his inauguration a year ago and backing his manufacturing push with tens of billions in pledged spending, which some analysts have called empty posturing.

Urging tech CEOs to break their silence, more than 450 employees from firms such as Google, Meta Platforms, Salesforce and OpenAI signed a letter on Saturday urging their top executives to pressure the White House to withdraw ICE from U.S. cities, cancel all contracts with ICE and to speak out publicly against ICE’s violence. 

“The wanton brutality … has removed any credibility that these actions are about immigration enforcement. Their goal is terror, cruelty, and suppression of dissent,” they said in the letter.

The workers noted that Trump had said he refrained from deploying federal agents to San Francisco after Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang and Salesforce CEO Marc Benioff advised against the action. 

(Reporting by Aditya Soni in Bengaluru; Editing by Sayantani Ghosh and Matthew Lewis)