Trump’s Minnesota ICE action forces CEOs to consider speaking out

The fatal shooting of another U.S. citizen this weekend by federal immigration agents in Minnesota has forced corporate leaders to do something they have rarely done since President Donald Trump returned to office last year: publicly disagree with his policies.

For months, executives remained quiet as the Trump administration expanded its sprawling anti-immigration crackdown. The Department of Homeland Security in recent weeks sent thousands of U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement and Border Patrol agents to Minnesota, leading to violent clashes with protesters.

It wasn’t until the Jan. 24 killing of ICU nurse Alex Pretty by federal agents that more CEOs began to break their year of near silence about the president’s actions. The next day, dozens of executives from Minnesota-based companies co-signed a letter calling for an “immediate de-escalation” in the state.

Even then, it was clear that business leaders were treading carefully, not mentioning the shooting victim, the president by name or his policies. Instead of speaking out individually, they spread the message as a group.

The reluctance of business leaders — among the most powerful and wealthiest Americans — to speak out against the president’s policies illustrates how Trump has used his power during his second term. Trump has sued media companies, law firms, universities and banks, threatening the companies with regulatory scrutiny and review of lucrative government contracts.

“They don’t want to speak out because they’re afraid,” Jeffrey Sonnenfeld, a Yale University School of Management professor, told CNBC. “They know they will be threatened, coerced and intimidated [by the administration]. “The retaliatory gestures are very severe.”

Some CEOs were a bit bolder: days before Preeti was killed, JPMorgan Chase Jamie Dimon has become the first prominent US CEO to criticize Trump’s anti-immigration campaign.

In the days after Preity’s death, Sam Altman, CEO of OpenAI, and Tim Cook, CEO of Apple, also spoke out. Altman made sharp comments in a Slack message to OpenAI employees, saying that “part of loving country is the American duty to respond to abuses” and that “what is happening with ICE is overblown.”

In his own internal letter to Apple workers on Tuesday, Tim Cook described himself as “heartbroken by the events in Minneapolis” and called for “de-escalation,” adding that he had privately expressed his concerns to Trump.

Trump in recent days appeared to soften his approach to the Department of Homeland Security’s presence in Minneapolis, using calming language that mirrored the executives’ public message and saying he had “very respectful” calls with Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz. But he has not yet pulled ICE agents from Minneapolis, and it’s not clear when he will.

Trump’s change in tone comes as the risk of a partial government shutdown grows later this week, with Democrats vowing to oppose funding for the Department of Homeland Security largely due to opposition to the administration’s Minneapolis operation.

One thing has been made clear, experts said: Preeti’s death and the viral spread of videos and analyzes surrounding his final moments show that there are limits to the business community’s obedience.

Minneapolis, home of major companies such as goal, UnitedHealth and 3MIt has become a testing ground for how far and how far corporate leaders will wade into escalating political tensions, which have been exacerbated by a president overstepping the bounds of state power.

There are examples of corporate leaders who have used their influence and turned things around before. In the fall, Trump planned to enforce Immigration and Customs Enforcement in San Francisco. However, the president canceled that in part due to conversations with Bay Area business leaders, including Salesforce CEO Marc Benioff and Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang.

Since Immigration, Customs Enforcement and Border Patrol agents flocked to Minnesota late last year in a plan dubbed Operation Metro Surge, videos have shown agents shoving protesters, detaining children, spraying protesters with chemical irritants and, in at least two cases, using their firearms.

The operation followed similar efforts in cities including Chicago and New Orleans, raising concerns about what some saw as agency overreach.

“I don’t like what I’m seeing, which is five grown men beating up young women,” JPMorgan’s Dimon said during an on-stage interview at the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland. “I think we’ve got to calm down a little bit of the domestic anger over immigration.”

Later in that discussion, Zane Minton Beddoes, editor-in-chief of The Economist, who interviewed Dimon, told the veteran CEO that she was surprised by how eager he and other leaders were to talk about Trump.

“I was really astonished by the unwillingness of America’s CEOs to say anything critical,” Minton Beddoes said. “There is a climate of fear in your country.”

But Dimon, who has spoken for years about the need for immigration reform, responded: “I think they have to change their approach to immigration.” “I said so. What the hell do you want me to say?”

The day after Dimon’s comments, Trump filed a lawsuit against JPMorgan and Dimon for $5 billion to close his bank accounts after the January 6, 2021 attack on the U.S. Capitol. While Trump warned that he would sue JPMorgan days before Dimon’s comments in Davos, the implication was clear: companies face retaliation for perceived slights against the president.

“If you’re the CEO of a company, this guy has the ability to influence your stock,” Tad DeHaven, a policy analyst at the Cato Institute, said of the president. “We have seen this administration weaponize every conceivable lever of power.”

A CNBC poll of corporate leaders, conducted in the days after Preeti’s killing, found that 56% said speaking out today is “much harder” when it comes to social and political issues. CNBC’s quick poll of 34 companies polled about their ICE presence in Minnesota.

Only one of the 34 business leaders surveyed reported having spoken publicly about the situation in Minneapolis, with about a third saying it had nothing to do with their business, 21% saying they were still considering making public comments, and 18% saying they were concerned about backlash from the Trump administration.

Some of these companies remained silent even as they acknowledged that the challenges were close to home: Of the companies surveyed, about 15% said they were aware of company employees who had been personally affected by ICE in the past 12 months.

In addition to the risk of retaliation from the White House, companies have also become reluctant to speak out, angering a divided American public, said Eli Yokeley, a US policy analyst at Morning Consult.

“A number of them are probably thinking about the backlash that happened after the wake, which came at least culturally and put some of them on their heels,” he said. “If you’re a consumer-facing brand, the last thing you want to get involved in is politics today in a highly polarized world.

“People can react very strongly,” Yokeley said.

Moreover, the general public is not even united in whether they think corporate leaders should have an opinion on Trump or his policies.

40% of Americans say CEOs who criticize Trump are acting responsibly, but only 28% say they should speak out when they disagree with the president’s policies, according to a Morning Consult poll of about 1,000 American adults conducted on January 20.

The survey found that about 38% of respondents said they would view the company less favorably if the CEO publicly praised Trump, while 25% said they would view the company more favorably.

On immigration enforcement, specifically, Americans are similarly divided over the role corporations play.

The share of Morning Consult respondents who said companies should fully cooperate with ICE, 23%, was almost equal to the share who said companies should actively resist, 22%.

Target, one of the most prominent Minneapolis-based companies, depicts the shift in corporate responses to politics from Trump’s first term to his second term.

In 2020, four days after George Floyd was killed by a police officer a short distance from the major retailer’s headquarters, Target CEO Brian Cornell wrote an emotional statement, calling Floyd’s death a homicide and naming other Black people killed by law enforcement.

Cornell and Target pledged to take action to support diversity and inclusion as the Black Lives Matter movement gains momentum across the country in the wake of Floyd’s death.

“As a target group, we came together, consoled, witnessed horrific scenes similar to what is happening now, and cried because not enough had changed,” he wrote at the time. “As a team, we pledged to face pain with purpose.”

Compare that to the current environment. Earlier this month, after the killing of Minnesota’s Renee Judd by an ICE agent, Target leaders did not issue a public statement. Instead, the company distributed internal memos from the company’s human resources chief, which acknowledged that employees were experiencing a “wide range of emotions” and emphasized the company’s focus on employee and customer safety.

FAQs associated with the warrants said the retailer “does not have cooperative agreements with ICE” and that federal agents, including ICE, have the legal authority to enter its parking lots and guest-facing parts of the stores without a warrant.

On Monday, Target’s incoming CEO, Michael Fidelke, shared a video message with employees directly acknowledging the unfolding events, but stopped short of calling on ICE agents to leave the city or review the two killings there. Fedelecki did not mention Good, Pretti or Trump by name.

“The violence and loss of life in our community is extremely painful,” he said. “I know this weighs heavily on the minds of many of you across the country, as it does me.”

Target may have reason to be skittish: Its sales have been hurt in recent years by boycotts from both Trump supporters and liberal critics who felt the retailer capitulated to Trump’s campaign against diversity, equity and inclusion programs.

But local leaders say the company has a responsibility to protect its community, too.

Over the past three weeks, a group of religious leaders in Minneapolis have called on the company to take a tougher stance against ICE actions in Minneapolis, particularly after two Target employees in Minneapolis, both U.S. citizens, were taken away by a team of ICE agents the day after Judd’s death.

The group said Target’s signature on the letter shared by other Minnesota companies was not enough.

“It’s almost worse than silence, because there was nothing,” said Martha Bardwell, pastor of Our Savior Lutheran Church in Minneapolis.

“We know that if Trump is going to listen to anyone, corporate leaders have a lot of power,” Bardwell said. “We are looking for CEOs to be very clear and use the power they have.”

Bardwell was part of a small group of Twin Cities clergy who met with Target CEO Cornell last week to encourage him to step up the company’s response. These clerics said they left the meeting without any new commitments from Target.