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

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

It wasn’t until the Jan. 24 killing of intensive care unit nurse Alex Pretti by federal agents that more CEOs started to break their year of near silence on the president’s actions. The following day, dozens of executives from Minnesota-based corporations co-signed a letter calling for an “immediate de-escalation” in the state.

Even then, it was clear the business leaders were treading carefully — they didn’t mention the name of the shooting victim, the president by name or his policies. Instead of speaking out individually, they published the message as a group.

The reluctance of business leaders — among the most powerful and wealthiest Americans — to explicitly 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, and he has threatened corporations with regulatory scrutiny and the review of lucrative government contracts.

“They don’t want to speak out alone because they are afraid,” Jeffrey Sonnenfeld, a Yale School of Management professor, told CNBC. “They know that they will be shaken down, coerced, intimidated [by the administration]. Retaliatory gestures are quite severe.”

Some CEOs have been slightly more bold: Days before Pretti’s killing, JPMorgan Chase’s Jamie Dimon became the first prominent U.S. CEO to criticize Trump’s immigration crackdown.

In the days that followed Pretti’s death, OpenAI CEO Sam Altman and Apple CEO Tim Cook have spoken out, too. Altman made pointed comments in a Slack message to OpenAI employees, saying that “part of loving the country is the American duty to push back against overreach” and that “what’s happening with ICE is going too far.”

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

Trump has in recent days appeared to soften his approach to DHS’ presence in Minneapolis, using language of de-escalation that mirrored the executives’ public letter and saying he had “very respectful” calls with Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz. But he has yet to pull ICE agents from Minneapolis, and it’s unclear when he will do so.

Trump’s change in tone comes as the risk rises of a partial government shutdown later this week, with Democrats vowing to oppose funding for the DHS in large part because of opposition to the administration’s Minneapolis operation.

Experts said one thing has been made clear: Pretti’s death and the viral spread of videos and analysis surrounding his final moments show there are limits to the obedience of the business community.

Minneapolis, home to mega corporations like Target, UnitedHealth and 3M, has become the testing ground for when and how far corporate leaders will wade into escalating political tensions, heightened by a president who pushes the bounds of state power.

There are examples of corporate leaders having used their influence and turning the tide before. In the fall, Trump planned ICE enforcement in San Francisco. Yet the president called it off in part due to conversations with Bay Area business leaders, including Salesforce CEO Marc Benioff and Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang.

Since ICE and Border Patrol agents poured into Minnesota late last year in a plan dubbed Operation Metro Surge, videos have shown agents shoving protestors, detaining children, spraying demonstrators with chemical irritants and, in at least two cases, using their firearms.

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

″I don’t like what I’m seeing, with five grown men beating up little women,” JPMorgan’s Dimon said during an onstage interview at the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland. “I think we should calm down a little bit on the internal anger about immigration.”

Later in that discussion, Dimon’s interviewer, The Economist Editor-in-Chief Zanny Minton Beddoes, told the veteran CEO that she was surprised at how careful he and other leaders were in speaking about Trump.

“I’m genuinely struck by the unwillingness of CEOs in America to say anything critical,” Minton Beddoes said. “There is a climate of fear in your country.”

Dimon, who has spoken of the need for immigration reform for years, pushed back: “I think they should change their approach to immigration,” Dimon said. “I’ve said it. What the hell else do you want me to say?”

The day after Dimon’s comments, Trump sued JPMorgan and Dimon for $5 billion for closing his bank accounts after the Jan. 6, 2021, attack on the U.S. Capitol. While Trump had warned he would sue JPMorgan days before Dimon’s comments at Davos, the implication was clear: Companies face retribution for perceived slights against the president.

“If you’re a corporate CEO, this man has the potential to tank your stock,” Tad DeHaven, a policy analyst at the Cato Institute, said of the president. “We’ve seen this administration weaponize every conceivable lever of power it has.”

A CNBC poll of corporate leaders, conducted in the days following Pretti’s killing, found 56% said it is “a lot more challenging” to speak out today when it comes to social and political causes. The CNBC Councils flash poll surveyed 34 companies about ICE’s presence in Minnesota.

Only one of the 34 corporate leaders surveyed reported they had spoken out publicly about the situation in Minneapolis, with about a third saying it was not relevant to their business, 21% saying they were still contemplating making public comments and 18% saying they were worried about backlash from the Trump administration.

Some of those companies remained silent even as they acknowledged the challenges were close to home: Among the surveyed businesses, about 15% said they were aware of company employees who had been personally impacted by ICE enforcement in the last 12 months.

In addition to the risk of retribution from the White House, companies have also become hesitant to speak out and anger a divided American public, said Eli Yokley, U.S. politics analyst for Morning Consult.

“A number of them are probably thinking about the post-‘woke’ backlash that came at least culturally and put some of them on their heels,” he said. “If you are a consumer-facing brand, the last thing you want to engage in is politics today in a world that is so polarized.

“People can react pretty fiercely,” Yokley said.

What’s more, the public isn’t united even in whether they think corporate leaders should weigh in on Trump or his policies. 

Forty percent of Americans say CEOs who criticize Trump are acting responsibly, but only 28% say they should speak out publicly when they disagree with the president’s policies, according to a Morning Consult survey of about 1,000 U.S. adults conducted on Jan. 20.

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

Around immigration enforcement, specifically, Americans are similarly divided on corporations’ role.

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

In 2020, four days after George Floyd was killed by a police officer just a short distance from the big-box retailer’s headquarters, Target CEO Brian Cornell wrote an emotional statement, describing Floyd’s death as murder and naming other Black people who had been killed by law enforcement.

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

“As a Target team, we’ve huddled, we’ve consoled, we’ve witnessed horrific scenes similar to what’s playing out now and wept that not enough is changing,” he wrote at the time. “And as a team we’ve vowed to face pain with purpose.”

Compare that to the current environment. Earlier this month, after Minnesotan Renee Good was killed by an ICE agent, Target leaders did not make a public statement. Instead, the company circulated internal memos from the firm’s human resources chief, which acknowledged that employees are experiencing “a wide range of emotions” and stressing the company’s focus on employee and customer safety.

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

On Monday, Target’s incoming CEO Michael Fiddelke shared a video message with employees that more directly acknowledged current events, but stopped short of calling for ICE agents to leave the city or for a review of the two shooting deaths there. Fiddelke didn’t reference Good, Pretti or Trump by name.

“The violence and loss of life in our community is incredibly painful,” he said. “I know it’s weighing heavily on many of you across the country, as it is with me.”

Target may have reason to be skittish: Its sales have been hit in recent years by boycotts from both Trump supporters and liberal critics who felt the retailer caved to Trump’s push 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 harsher stance against ICE action in Minneapolis, particularly after two Target employees in Minneapolis, both U.S. citizens, were taken by a team of ICE agents the day after Good’s death.

Target’s signature on the joint letter among other Minnesota companies didn’t go far enough, the group said.

“It’s almost worse than silence, because it felt like nothing,” said Martha Bardwell, pastor of Our Saviours Lutheran Church in Minneapolis.

“We know that if Trump is going to listen to anybody, corporate leaders have a lot of power,” Bardwell said. “We are looking to 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. Those clergy said they left the meeting without any new pledges from Target.

Five years after a band of online traders sent GameStop skyrocketing and upended Wall Street’s assumptions about “dumb money,” the influence of retail investors has proven more durable and long-lasting than many expected.

What began as a dramatic short squeeze in early 2021 has evolved into a persistent force in equity markets, reshaping trading dynamics, pushing hedge funds to adapt and providing a steady source of dip-buying flows of cash that helped underpin one of the longest bull markets on record.

“Retail investors were always signals to me,” said Tom Lee, head of research at Fundstrat, whose flagship exchange-traded fund exceeds $4 billion in assets. “When they were buying dips, the bull market was healthy. From 2009 to 2020, institutions acted like retail didn’t exist. That changed completely after 2020. Retail investors are difference-makers. They can move markets with size and conviction.”

Before the pandemic, retail trading accounted for only a small fraction of daily equity volumes in the U.S. That changed as lockdown-era government stimulus payments, zero-commission trading and social media-fueled coordination pulled millions of new investors into markets.

“A lot of people assumed that once Covid cleared and everyone went back to their daily lives, retail participation would fall off,” said Steve Quirk, chief brokerage officer at Robinhood Markets. “What surprised me a little is just how strong it’s been.”

On average, individual investor participation in U.S. equities has risen to nearly 20% of daily trading volume, up from low single digits before Covid, according to Jeff Shen, co-chief investment officer and co-head of systematic active equities at BlackRock.

“There is certainly a social aspect of it that is quite foreign to a classic hedge fund where there’s a lot of independence,” Shen said. “The social aspect makes this type of flow very correlated” among varying types of Main Street investor.

Quirk noted that on high-volume days, retail participation in equities could shoot up to close to 40% and, on the options side, as high as 50% of volume.

During the meme stock frenzy, traders flocked to online forums such as Reddit’s WallStreetBets, where ideas spread at a rapid pace and unprecedented scale. Figures like Keith Gill, known online as Roaring Kitty, emerged as focal points for a loosely coordinated community that shared research, trading strategies and a deep skepticism of Wall Street orthodoxy. The GameStop saga also left a mark on popular culture, inspiring the 2023 film Dumb Money, starring Paul Dano and Seth Rogen.

Far from being wiped out after the meme-stock boom faded, retail investors have continued to deploy capital — propelling retail flows to new records in 2025, according to JPMorgan. The bank found inflows jumped nearly 60% from the prior year and were about 17% higher than the previous peak set in 2021, when meme-stock trading was at its height.

“This is a new retail investor that is much more informed, much more engaged, has many more tools,” said Devin Ryan, Citizens JMP senior analyst. “It’s not just democratization of access to the markets, but also of information.”

A drop in trading commissions in 2019, and the rise of fractional trading also helped open up markets ahead of Covid. A few decades ago, trading commissions were close to $100. By 2020, most brokerage firms had also added the ability to trade “fractions” of a share. That meant you could buy in dollar amounts versus needing to have thousands to get access to your favorite tech stock. And there were largely no account minimums.

Respect from institutions

Hedge funds and short sellers learned a painful lesson. Crowded bearish positions now carry greater risk in an era where retail traders can quickly mobilize capital and amplify moves.

“It’s just so great to see that dumb money moniker go away, and then to get respect from the institutions,” said JJ Kinahan, head of retail expansion and alternative investment products at Cboe Global Markets. “Professionals learned a lesson from the tenaciousness of the retail investors who believe in companies and continue to buy them.”

Many hedge funds have scaled back short exposure, diversified portfolios and invested heavily in tracking retail sentiment to avoid becoming targets of coordinated buying.

“To many professional investors, retail traders have become that annoying TV-series villain who never quite gets written out,” said Ivan Ćosović, founder of Breakout Point, a firm that tracks retail trader activity on discussion boards. “Now, five years in, it’s basically the fifth season of the show, and somehow they’re still in the cast.”

Retail investors’ dip-buying during key drawdowns like the tariff-induced selloff in early April — along with the rush into the SPDR Gold Shares (GLD) — last year resulted in bumper returns that left Wall Street taking note.

In 2026, everyday investors have turned their attention to energy stocks following the U.S. strike on Venezuela and silver amid the metal’s monster run. Silver passed the $100 per ounce mark for the first time last week.

“They bailed out the market during Covid, and they bailed it out again during the tariffs, they were aggressive buyers,” Robinhood’s Quirk said. “People underestimate how savvy retail investors are.”

To be sure, other volatile investing opportunities have popped up in the void left by pandemic-era short-squeezes of stocks like GameStop and AMC. Demand for options and leveraged funds have boomed in recent years, while a new class of meme stocks including Opendoor and Kohl’s sprouted up in 2025.

But at exchange-traded fund manager Direxion, retail investors are using their high-risk levered instruments wisely, according to CEO Douglas Yones. Firm research shows mom-and-pop investors are typically devoting only a small portion of their overall portfolios to these speculative plays, while keeping most of their money in more traditional investments.

“The markets are playing into the hands of retail,” said Yones, a former executive at the New York Stock Exchange. “The volatility has been incredibly good for end investors.”

Wealth transfer

Retail’s influence is being reinforced by a favorable backdrop of rising stocks and a looming generational wealth transfer from baby boomers, a shift that is gradually putting more capital in the hands of investors comfortable with digital-first trading.

Household investors collectively control more wealth than institutional investors, Fundstrat’s Lee said, with roughly 76% of household wealth held by people over the age of 60, a demographic that has traditionally been less active in trading but increasingly influential as assets shift hands.

Lee added that about $120 trillion will be inherited by millennials and Gen Z over the next 20 years.

“Retail participation could get much, much bigger,” Lee said. “That’s four times the size of the US economy. It’s more wealth than the entire net worth of China.”

Brokerage firms are starting to build tools to cater to these younger investors. They’ve overwhelmingly moved toward 24/7 trading, a hallmark of cryptocurrency markets which trade on nights and weekends. More firms are offering access to cryptocurrencies and crypto ETFs, while prediction markets are booming. There’s also been a rise in private markets offerings for average investors.

‘The greatest thing since sliced bread’

Already, data shows how much more skin young people have in the game. JPMorgan found 37% of 25-year-olds in 2024 moved “significant” sums from checking to investment accounts in recent years — a sharp increase from the 6% recorded doing the same in 2015.

Nick Wyatt, a 27-year-old auditor, is one of those Covid-era traders. With extra downtime during the pandemic, the Michigan resident researched and consulted a friend on how best to grow his spare cash saved from a part-time job in the market. Wyatt briefly tried day-trading stocks as he began investing, but quickly decided to instead use a conservative, long-term strategy that includes funding a Roth individual retirement account.

“It’s the best decision I ever made,” said Wyatt, who has since gotten his fiancé into investing and used profits for a down payment on a home. “Compounding interest is the greatest thing since sliced bread. You can’t beat it.”

Early evidence suggests that White House policy is reducing the size of the immigrant labor force, in turn contributing to a recent drawdown in the overall U.S. labor pool, according to several economists.

CNBC spoke with a range of economists from financial firms, economic research institutions and think tanks, and also reviewed recent research notes and analyses that economists have published on immigration and the job market.

If a reduction in the immigrant labor force is sustained, such a trend would be a concern for the U.S. economy, those experts have said or written.

That’s because the economy will increasingly rely on immigrants to fuel population and labor force growth given demographic trends among the U.S.-born populace, like retirements among baby boomers and lower fertility rates, they said.

The downward shift in the immigrant labor force in recent months is “definitive,” said Mark Zandi, chief economist at Moody’s.

“There’s no debate what’s going on there,” Zandi said.

The Trump administration is also readying a rule to end the lottery for H-1B visas — temporary work visas for college graduates in “specialty” fields like architecture, law and tech — and adopt a selection process that favors higher-wage earners.

Available data makes it hard to track what’s happening to immigration flows and the immigrant labor pool in real time, economists said.

Some point to Bureau of Labor Statistics data as one signal.

The size of the foreign-born labor force has declined by about 1.2 million people since January, to 32.1 million total people in July, BLS data shows. (Some government data distinguishes between “foreign-born” and “native-born” workers — or, immigrants versus those born in the U.S.)

Nancy Vanden Houten, lead economist at Oxford Economics, cited the data in an Aug. 1 research note.

“[S]igns are mounting that the foreign-born labor force is shrinking due to the Trump administration’s immigration policies,” she wrote.

The U.S. labor force includes all people age 16 and older who are actively working or looking for work.

The BLS’ reported decline in the foreign-born labor force has been “very dramatic” and larger than expected, said Stephen Brown, deputy chief North America economist at Capital Economics.

In July, the labor force participation rate had declined 0.3 percentage point for native-born workers compared with a year earlier, but had fallen by a much larger 1.2 percentage points for foreign-born workers, according to a J.P. Morgan analysis.

“[M]any immigrants appear to be leaving the labor force, wrote David Kelly, chief global strategist at J.P. Morgan Asset Management.

White House spokesperson Abigail Jackson said in an emailed statement that the Trump administration is committed to helping U.S. employers “ensure they have the legal workforce they need to be successful.”

“There is no shortage of American minds and hands to grow our labor force, and President Trump’s agenda to create jobs for American workers represents this Administration’s commitment to capitalizing on that untapped potential while delivering on our mandate to enforce our immigration laws,” Jackson wrote.

Some economists say the BLS data on the foreign-born and native-born labor force segments isn’t a reliable gauge of near-term trends, due to various quirks in how it’s collected and reported.

Trump questioned the accuracy of BLS statistics and fired the bureau’s chief in August after a monthly report showed unexpectedly weak job growth.

But there’s other evidence that economists point to that also suggests the immigrant labor pool is shrinking.

For example, job growth among industries that rely more heavily on undocumented immigrants has been “significantly weaker” than in the rest of the private sector, said Jed Kolko, a senior fellow at the Peterson Institute for International Economics and former undersecretary for economic affairs at the U.S. Department of Commerce during the Biden administration.

Job growth in those industries — such as hotels, restaurants, construction and home health aides — has been flat since the start of 2025, said Kolko. In July, jobs grew at a 0% rate in immigrant-heavy industries, he found.

Meanwhile, job growth has slowed in the rest of the private sector — a roughly 0.6% pace in July — but the deceleration wasn’t as stark, he said.

Kolko analyzed federal data to calculate the three-month average annualized rate of employment growth in respective industries.

Matthew Martin, senior U.S. economist at Oxford Economics, found an additional link between immigration policy and its impact on the labor force.

Labor force growth has been “stagnant” in states like Texas and Florida with high immigrant arrests per capita, he wrote in an Aug. 4 research note, citing Immigration and Customs Enforcement data.

“States such as Texas and Florida have seen more intense crackdowns than California, New York, and New Jersey,” Martin wrote. The “low-arrest” states have seen positive labor force growth in 2025, by contrast, he wrote.

“The data show that while the foreign-born labor force in low arrest-to-population states has increased since the beginning of the year, the labor force in high-arrest states flatlined,” he wrote.

“[B]ecause of immigration policy really, the flow into our labor forces is just a great deal slower,” Powell said during a news conference on July 30.

The total U.S. labor force — including immigrants and native-born workers — has fallen for three consecutive months, according to BLS data. It has declined by 402,000 people from January to July, to about 170.3 million, the BLS reported.

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Arrests and deportations, fear of showing up to the workplace, and fewer flows of immigrants into the U.S. may be playing a role, economists said.

Two programs that have given roughly 1.8 million immigrants from troubled countries the temporary right to live and work in the U.S. are being phased out this year, wrote Kelly of J.P. Morgan. This change in status may reduce labor supply by more than 1 million workers, he wrote, citing J.P. Morgan research.

Of course, a decline in the labor supply isn’t only a function of immigration.

For example, unemployed people discouraged by the difficulty of finding a job right now may opt to sit on the sidelines instead of looking for work, meaning they wouldn’t be counted in the labor force, said Brown of Capital Economics.

The White House has also taken steps that it says will boost employment among immigrants who are in the U.S. legally.

The Department of Labor established the Office of Immigration Policy in June, which the administration has said will streamline the process to secure temporary and permanent work visas, for example. Trump also signed an executive order in April seeking to support high-paid, skilled trade jobs.

Without immigration, the population would shrink starting in 2033, partly because fertility rates are projected to remain low, according to the nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office.

Additionally, a smaller labor pool might put pressure on employers to raise wages to attract talent, potentially exacerbating inflation, and would bring in less tax revenue to fund programs like Social Security, economists said.

The construction industry, which already suffers from labor shortages, is at risk of wage inflation, for example, according to a Bank of America Institute report published Tuesday.

Average wage growth in July approached 8% in the construction industry, nearly double the national average, according to the report.

“Immigration actions could potentially deepen workforce shortages, drive up costs and create serious financial risks for contractors,” the Bank of America report said.

About 34% of construction workers are immigrants, versus the 20% average across all sectors, the report said. In trades like drywall installers or plasterers, the share is closer to 60%, it said.

A shortage of skilled labor already costs the U.S. economy about $10.8 billion per year due to longer construction times and raises the price of new single-family homes by about $2,600, on average, according to a joint analysis published in June by the Home Builders Institute, the National Association of Home Builders and the University of Denver.

However, some economists are skeptical that the U.S. will suffer a prolonged reduction in the immigrant labor force.

The Trump administration’s plan likely isn’t to have “net-out migration,” Strain said.

“We didn’t see net-out migration in [Trump’s] first term,” Strain said. “That’d cause all sorts of problems for businesses, for key sectors of the economy the president cares about, like construction, and I’d be surprised if that’s where we end up.”

“But who knows?” he added.