CEOs are finally speaking out about ICE. Is corporate activism back?

For weeks, corporate leaders across the country largely stayed silent as immigration officers descended on the city of Minneapolis, eventually killing two civilians. In recent days, however, CEOs and prominent tech figures have slowly raised their voices in protest—though many of them have been careful not to mention President Trump by name or directly criticize ICE agents. 

Over 60 CEOs from Minnesota-based companies—including the likes of Target and 3M—called for “an immediate deescalation of tensions” in a letter on January 25. In leaked comments, tech leaders like Sam Altman and Tim Cook claimed to have spoken to Trump, while Altman noted that “what’s happening with ICE is going too far.” In a recent editorial in the San Francisco Standard, LinkedIn cofounder Reid Hoffman called on fellow tech executives to speak out against the Trump administration rather than remaining neutral. “January’s tragic events in Minneapolis should end that posture,” he wrote. “We leaders in tech and business have power—economic, social, platform power—and sitting on that power right now is not good business.”

Many of the statements from CEOs have faced criticism for not being forceful enough, and tech workers have urged their employers to use their influence to put pressure on the White House. Still, any kind of public comment from corporate leaders represents a shift from the defensive crouch many of them have taken since Trump took office, due to fears that they would be targeted by the administration.

Fast Company spoke to Ike Silver, a marketing professor at the USC Marshall School of Business, about what to make of business leaders wading into this issue—and why even a muted corporate response indicates the tides may be turning across corporate America. 

This interview has been edited for length and clarity.

Fast Company: How would you characterize the corporate activism we’ve seen from companies under the Trump administration? 

Ike Silver: For a long time, the general status quo marketing strategy advice was: Avoid political issues. Over the course of the last 20 years or so, that landscape has shifted such that consumers demand to know more about where companies stand. People can question businesses, and that sort of thing can go viral. But there have been these shifting market-based incentives for companies to get involved—at least up until November 2024. 

At that point, there was a shift, and I would attribute that shift to two things: One is that the Trump administration has been very vocal and active, both in signaling that it would not tolerate companies that took a political stance it did not agree with, but also actually going through with various executive actions to make life for businesses who speak out more difficult in various ways. We’ve seen things as simple as Trump getting on Truth Social and just trashing a company and calling on his followers to boycott, all the way to threats to use the FCC in various ways to block corporate actions. 

So to my eye, what we’re seeing from business leaders is keeping their fiduciary commitments in mind and being more reticent to respond to consumer demands out of fear of being targeted by the current administration. That kind of targeting can have very real economic costs for companies.

The other thing that’s worth mentioning is that Trump’s election, I think, signaled a shift in the perceptions of the national mood—it wouldn’t surprise me at all if business leaders looked at Trump’s election and thought, well, the tides are moving against some of these liberal causes that we’ve previously taken sides on. So it’s not just threats from the administration, but it’s also a perception that maybe there is less consumer appetite for companies to take sides. There is some research suggesting that, as a general rule, conservatives are a bit less enthusiastic about companies taking political sides, even their side. Liberals tend to demand that companies get involved to a greater extent.  

We’ve now seen a number of CEOs and business leaders speak out about what’s happening in Minnesota, though some of them have faced criticism for being too neutral. Is this a shift companies have made since Trump took office?

I think the devastating carnage that we’re seeing out of Minneapolis has spurred some CEOs to speak out. There are CEOs of AI companies coming out and saying, “I tend to be very moderate, but what I’m seeing is very disturbing to me.” And every little statement of that sort kind of adds up and creates a sense that companies are a bit more willing than they’ve been to speak out. Because there are more doing it—and they’re not immediately facing direct punishment from the government—that creates even more safety. 

Why do you think we’re seeing corporate leaders comment at all on this issue, given the political environment?

Public opinion on this issue is much clearer. A big part of what companies do when they decide whether or not to get involved in these issues is thinking about: What percentage of my target market is going to align with what I’m saying, and what percentage of my target market is going to oppose what I’m saying? 

The combination of outcry on social media, days of activism across the country, the visibility of the protests, the unpopularity of ICE in the wake of some of the videos that we’ve seen coming out of Minneapolis—all of those factors combine to give business leaders the sense that the consumer market will be amenable to them getting involved in this kind of issue. 

This isn’t going to be Bud Light with Dylan Mulvaney, where half the people respond positively, but half the people respond super negatively. This is the kind of issue where there is a bit more national consensus, at least insofar as people are concerned about the specific tactics that ICE is using for enforcement.  

It is true that the executive branch is quite powerful, but they still have to admonish companies one by one for this kind of action. If thousands of CEOs are speaking out, the likelihood that any one will be punished is lower. If one actor pokes their head up and says something, then the government can kind of squash that. But it’s much harder to do that when it feels more like the whole business community is taking a stand. 

Do you think companies feel a moral imperative to speak out about ICE’s actions—that they’re treating this any differently than other political issues? 

A question that is really hard to answer from the outside is whether any given business leader is speaking out because of their own conscience or because of market forces. My personal perspective is that business leaders typically want to do both. When opinion polling clearly shows that people are against what ICE is doing, CEOs who might already have had reservations about the Trump administration’s actions, but who might have felt it would be costly for them to speak out, now have cover to come forward and make a business case for the company taking a stand in some way. 

You can’t go to your stakeholders and shareholders and say, ‘The government is against us, and it’s not clear if consumers want us to, but my conscience says we have to speak out on this thing at any cost.’ But if you are the kind of CEO who wants to speak your mind, who wants to be able to behave in line with your moral compass, then the fact that the national environment seems to be amenable to that at the moment, can provide cover. That’s not to say that every business leader is doing this for conscience reasons, but given that there are still salient costs and that many CEOs tend to be risk averse at baseline, I think there’s probably a lot of speaking conscience going on right now.

How much value is there in corporate leaders speaking out later, once they feel as though the environment is more amenable to it?

As more companies come forward, consumers become aware that it’s reasonable to expect companies to come forward, and they start to penalize companies that don’t. The other aspect of this is that if you are late to the party, you’re typically seen as less authentic in your support. 

I happen to think that we want to have business environments in which companies are encouraged to come forward—that even if you’re late to the party, it’s better that you sort of come forward and stand up for your morals than not. But there’s a consumer skepticism that goes with that. I’m working on a paper that basically argues that for any social purpose activity to go well, the company needs to choose a cause that consumers are aligned with, and they need to communicate an authentic commitment to it. 

In 2020, there was a lot of public pressure on companies to speak out after George Floyd’s murder. Many of them made bold commitments to diversity, equity, and inclusion and then quietly divested from that work, as we have seen more recently. Do you think this moment is different? 

I don’t think that it is reasonable to expect that companies will devote all of their resources to fighting every political battle consistently forever. I think what’s important is for consumers who care about issues to help create an environment in which companies are incentivized to get involved—so consistently rewarding companies who do things in line with our values, and trying to move away from spending our money with companies who do things that contravene our values. 

We’re obviously in an employer’s market right now. Do companies care as much right now about demands from their workforce to speak out on political issues?

Companies are somewhat less concerned about this now, in an environment in which employees have fewer outside options. That also relates to the general health of the economy and the rise of AI. There are a number of companies who may legitimately be thinking, if some folks leave because of this, we won’t show up on the cover of The Wall Street Journal over layoffs. As a general rule, it’s harder for employees to leave than it is for customers to leave, so I tend to think that companies are a bit more responsive to the consumer landscape than to the employee landscape. 

That said, there are some companies who position themselves as being sort of explicitly moral, and those kinds of companies attract people who care about that a lot as employees. I’m thinking about Patagonia, or Ben and Jerry’s, or National Geographic. It also matters a lot what the political makeup of the employee base is. If you’re a large multinational company and you have employees on either side, maybe you’re thinking, our involvement will galvanize some but alienate others, so let’s just stay out of it—even if there are swaths of employees asking us to speak out. In this particular case, the public opinion data suggests that people are quite angry, so companies are in this position to be able to satisfy a lot of different stakeholders. 

This week, the Trump administration pulled hundreds of ICE officers out of Minnesota. Do you think the statements from corporate leaders had any bearing on that decision? And do you expect to see more companies speak out now?

Although the administration is quite powerful, they are not at all immune from the costs of contravening public sentiment. The midterms are coming. Trump will not be in power forever. If you look at senators and Congress people from more moderate districts, they are speaking out. 

One thing that’s interesting is that in many cases, these companies are speaking out in the absence of any particular boycotts or consumer pressure on their own brand. There are definitely signals that there is broad consumer sentiment in favor of taking a stand against ICE. But it’s not as if many of these companies speaking out are themselves facing targeted, economically costly boycotts—which I think speaks in favor of the idea that business leaders do care about this issue. Business leaders are people, too. They also don’t like seeing Americans gunned down in the streets.  

The less you think that a company is in the public eye and expected to speak out about this thing, the more you should kind of assume that when they do speak out, they’re doing it for some moral reasons. Unfortunately, we can’t put a secret camera in these boardrooms that would tell us definitively why companies are doing this. But I generally think it’s a mix of these things. There are market forces, and then there’s also the moral compasses of these CEOs—which are sometimes faulty, but not non-existent.