More And More Tech Leaders Are Denouncing Trump’s Muslim Ban

This story is being updated with the latest developments. Scroll down for a timeline of reactions (in reverse chronology), click on the bottom to expand.

A growing number of tech leaders, including Google CEO Sundar Pichai, Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey, Uber CEO Travis Kalanick, and Amazon’s Jeff Bezos are denouncing President Trump’s executive order that bans refugees from seven Muslim-majority countries: Syria, Iran, Somalia, Iraq, Yemen, Libya, and Sudan. The orders were signed by the president on Friday.

Since Friday afternoon, when Facebook founder and CEO Mark Zuckerberg expressed his “concern” over the order, the reactions to the order have grown in size and outrage. Some companies, like Amazon, were criticized for initial tepid responses and later issued tougher statements about the controversial order. By Monday morning, it seemed like the majority of prominent tech voices, with the exception of Oracle, had chimed in to express their outrage. One industry that stands out for its silence on the issue is telecom: AT&T, Verizon, Sprint, and T-Mobile either did not respond or declined comment when contacted by Politico.

Pichai wrote a memo to his staff saying that the order will impact 100 Google employees, adding that “it is painful to see the personal cost of this executive order on our colleagues.” And Google cofounder Sergey Brin, who immigrated to the U.S. from the former Soviet Union when he was just 6, attended the protest at San Francisco Airport against the order, telling reporters: “I’m here because I’m a refugee.”

Amid massive protests at airports around the country over the detention of immigrants arriving from those seven countries, late on Saturday night a federal judge in Brooklyn issued an emergency ruling allowing those detained immigrants to stay in the U.S. “We won,” Dale Ho, ACLU’s director of Voting Rights Project, told the NY Daily News, adding that the government must provide a list of names of those affected. “Stay is national.”

 

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