Tech Workers Coalition

(Read the Spanish version here)

Los Angeles is now a battleground in defense of the right to protest. On June 13th, 2025, the federal government made the unprecedented decision to deploy 700 Marines to Los Angeles, in addition to 4,000 members of the California National Guard, while the LA Mayor issued a curfew in the downtown area, signaling an ultimate attack on basic civil liberties. These repressive actions came after several days of union-led and community-based protests against the escalation of ICE raids throughout the city, which has sought to violently isolate and terrorize the Latino and Angeleno working community at large. 

Many of the people targeted by ICE are workers laboring in warehouses, retail stores, and small shops, alongside their families. Many are also community leaders. The head of the California SEIU, David Huerta, was arrested and detained while ICE raided a garment warehouse, and now faces federal charges and possible jail time. This unequivocally represents an attack on organized labor and highlights the close connection between union rights and immigrant rights. In response, there have been SEIU-initiated protests that have taken place around the country, with other unions joining in solidarity. We as tech workers must also do our part. 

The appendages of the tech industry extend far beyond the corporate office walls. Across the tech industry’s value chain, there are workers in all corners: Amazon employs hundreds of thousands of warehouse and logistics workers; Uber, Lyft, Instacart, and DoorDash are among just a few companies that rely on gig workers and deliveristas for their services. Not only are these workers subject to miserable conditions, contingent and uncertain employment, and low pay, but they are prime targets of the ICE raids. Regardless of whether workers do manual work or sit at a desk, whether laboring in distribution centers or creating tech infrastructure that facilitates the circulation of commodities, a blow against one worker is a blow against us all. 

These attacks on immigrants are an attack on labor, and all workers. Tech workers, in particular, are caught in this web in extremely precarious ways. Not only are gig-workers and others in the app economy targeted, but the administration has also indicated its desire to attack H-1B workers, who are also widely employed by Silicon Valley titans. In March, TWC held a panel “Immigrant Rights are Labor Rights – Tech Workers and H-1B Visas” where such workers discussed how to connect their concerns to unionizing and organizing. In white-collar tech work, as much as manufacturing, right-wing nativists try to paint immigrants as competing with native-born workers for jobs. In doing so, they’re doing the boss’s work by dividing the working class, trying to displace blame for layoffs or slashed benefits from the profiteers who exploit us, and onto our fellow workers. To build the solidarity necessary for unionization and mass organizing, standing with immigrant and foreign workers is not an optional addition to our labor organizing, but structurally necessary in the minimum viable core. 

We are no strangers to fighting back. In 2018, during Trump’s first term, the bosses of the big tech companies expressed a concern for immigrant rights, and adopted, at least verbally, an oppositional stance to the Trump administration. A number of CTOs and CEOs signed the “never again pledge.” Tech workers sought to hold their employers’ feet to the fire to live up to their self-described values.  We stood up and opposed their employers’ complicity and willing participation with ICE, with workers from Microsoft to Amazon and beyond demanding “No Tech for ICE.” The Tech Workers Coalition helped to organize Tech Won’t Build It workshops and events, spreading the message even to workers at private tech companies such as Palantir. 

As Trump and DOGE privatize government functions and slash government jobs, the administration has been relying even more heavily on Palantir to compile databases and surveillance data, especially to target immigrant workers. The attacks on immigrant rights and those who defend them are an exercise in social control that Palantir’s founders sell as their vision for the future and as the centrality of their services to the American state. This is not new: the militarization of the tech industry and its connections to violence on vulnerable populations have a deep history. Right at its military origins, the internet was always intended as a tool for spying. Since then, with continued government support and funding, the tech industry has poured billions into creating robust military tech, deployed from battlefields to drones used at borders and protests to scraping all of our inboxes. 

Today, compelled by a combination of the end of cheap credit and the threat of growing unionization, including of tech workers, tech executives have more fulsomely embraced the far-right rhetoric of the Trump administration. Just recently, four executives from major companies have been enrolled as lieutenant colonels in the military reserve. Today in 2025, we face circumstances that are perhaps worse than 2018, but also with fewer illusions.  Now ex-Palantir employees are among those opposing this new round of outsourced spying and repression. Workers with No Tech for Apartheid (NOTA) and TWC members are also supporting actions in various cities to fight against the deportation machine that demolishes the safety of various communities vulnerable to criminalization. 

Tech workers are still largely unorganized, but our labor is fundamental to the functioning of modern society and the state. Those who do the work must have a voice in how it is used — tech workers are not mere pawns in some abstract-cartoonishly-evil system, but humans with the agency to take ownership over what results from our labor. By virtue of doing the work, we have the leverage to compel change. We must leverage our power to act in solidarity with the immigrant community, immigrant organizations, and the SEIU to demand an end to the deportations and raids, as well as ICE, National Guard and Marines out of our cities, and that all charges be dropped against Huerta and all protesters. This new offensive is another salvo in Trump’s campaign against the rights and living standards of the entire class. During the Biden administration, even as deportations and ICE crackdowns continued, the tech worker protest movement fell back, as it often does under Democrats. We need to relearn past lessons, and develop new practices and tactics.

Tech workers will continue to join protests, and with effort, we must begin to do so in organized contingents. (Here are some TWC signs that can be printed and used). Those of us already in unions must seek to exert pressure within these institutions to take action in solidarity with immigrants. But we also need to determine how to incorporate these issues into our coworker-to-coworker organizing, and consider how even minority actions within our workplaces may exert pressure on our bosses. We must think more strategically about who has power, and who really controls the output of our work, and how it is possible to shift the balances of power and control. To do this, we must be committed to our organizing, in mapping out decision-makers at our workplace, in identifying chokepoints in the supply chain, and in moving our coworkers to come with us and leverage collective power to end these atrocities. 

The Amazon Labor Union - IBT Local 1 published an Immigrant Solidarity Official Statement with a list of demands on Amazon and pledging union response to immigration-related incidents. If you are a unionized tech worker, organize for solidarity with immigrant workers, and pass statements along to the Tech Workers Coalition. If you are not in a union, consider using this moment as an organizing issue, and begin to connect with fellow coworkers — trainings from EWOC can help get things started. We in TWC are looking for ways to hold events and help develop a renewed mobilization of tech workers against ICE and the security state — consider joining up and getting involved.

While our bosses may be choosing to join the US Army, we as tech workers cannot lie down and become a new branch of the military against our will. We condemn the violence destroying our communities and inflicted on millions abroad, and we know that the only way to win is to take back power into our own hands.