97 Tech Companies Join Forces To Oppose Donald Trump's Immigration Ban

The biggest names in Silicon Valley lined up over the weekend to support a high-profile legal battle against President Donald Trump's recent executive orders banning immigrants from seven mostly Muslim countries. Having already publicly denounced Trump's orders, which were temporarily blocked last week by a federal judge, leaders in the technology industry joined a friend of the court brief opposing the ban.

Trump's orders represent "a significant departure from the principles of fairness and predictability that have governed the immigration system of the United States for more than fifty years," reads the amicus brief, written by Andrew Pincus of the Washington, D.C.-based law firm Mayer Brown LLP. "The Order makes it more difficult and expensive for U.S. companies to recruit, hire, and retain some of the world’s best employees. It disrupts ongoing business operations. And it threatens companies’ ability to attract talent, business, and investment to the United States."

The amicus brief, filed in the 9th Circuit Court of Appeals in San Francisco late Sunday, is in support of a lawsuit against Trump's immigration orders by Washington state Attorney General Bob Ferguson. Seattle-based Amazon had previously filed a declaration of support in the case, and as a result was not on the list of firms who joined the friend of the court brief. Notably absent as well were Oracle, Qualcomm and IBM. In a statement to FORBES, a spokesperson for IBM said its CEO, Ginni Rometty, "conveyed the company's views directly" to Trump at an in-person meeting last week. That meeting, also attended by Tesla and SpaceX CEO Elon Musk, was originally to include other Silicon Valley leaders who pulled out after intense public backlash against the immigration orders.

The last time tech companies joined forces on this scale was nearly a year ago, when dozens of firms signed friend of the court briefs in support of Apple in the smartphone maker's encryption battle with the federal government. At the time, the unifying thread for companies was a shared resistance to government-imposed orders on software security built into devices. Now, it's the widely-held belief in Silicon Valley that immigrants have and continue to be a driving force in the American economy - or at least, for the Valley's own bottom line.

"Immigrants are leading entrepreneurs," Sunday's brief reads. "Some of these businesses are large. Immigrants or their children founded more than 200 of the companies on the Fortune 500 list ... Collectively, these companies generate annual revenue of $4.2 trillion, and employ millions of Americans."

It's unclear exactly how the brief came together over the weekend, and which technology trade organizations, if any, were involved. Pincus declined to comment beyond the order Monday morning.

Many of the same companies who signed the brief are still expected to send a public letter to Trump's administration regarding the ban.

Here is a complete list of the companies who signed the order, in alphabetical order:

1. AdRoll, Inc. 2. Aeris Communications, Inc. 3. Airbnb, Inc. 4. AltSchool, PBC 5. Ancestry.com, LLC 6. Appboy, Inc. 7. Apple Inc. 8. AppNexus Inc. 9. Asana, Inc. 10. Atlassian Corp Plc 11. Autodesk, Inc. 12. Automattic Inc. 13. Box, Inc. 14. Brightcove Inc. 15. Brit + Co 16. CareZone Inc. 17. Castlight Health 18. Checkr, Inc.

19. Chobani, LLC 20. Citrix Systems, Inc. 21. Cloudera, Inc. 22. Cloudflare, Inc. 23. Copia Institute 24. DocuSign, Inc. 25. DoorDash, Inc. 26. Dropbox, Inc. 27. Dynatrace LLC 28. eBay Inc. 29. Engine Advocacy 30. Etsy Inc. 31. Facebook, Inc. 32. Fastly, Inc. 33. Flipboard, Inc. 34. Foursquare Labs, Inc. 35. Fuze, Inc. 36. General Assembly 37. GitHub 38. Glassdoor, Inc. 39. Google Inc. 40. GoPro, Inc. 41. Harmonic Inc. 42. Hipmunk, Inc. 43. Indiegogo, Inc.44. Intel Corporation 45. JAND, Inc. d/b/a Warby Parker 46. Kargo Global, Inc.47. Kickstarter, PBC 48. KIND, LLC 49. Knotel 50. Levi Strauss & Co. 51. LinkedIn Corporation 52. Lithium Technologies, Inc. 53. Lyft, Inc. 54. Mapbox, Inc. 55. Maplebear Inc. d/b/a Instacart 56. Marin Software Incorporated 57. Medallia, Inc. 58. A Medium Corporation 59. Meetup, Inc. 60. Microsoft Corporation 61. Motivate International Inc. 62. Mozilla Corporation 63. Netflix, Inc. 64. NETGEAR, Inc. 65. NewsCred, Inc. 66. Patreon, Inc. 67. PayPal Holdings, Inc. 68. Pinterest, Inc. 69. Quora, Inc. 70. Reddit, Inc. 71. Rocket Fuel Inc. 72. SaaStr Inc. 73. Salesforce.com, Inc. 74. Scopely, Inc. 75. Shutterstock, Inc. 76. Snap Inc. 77. Spokeo, Inc. 78. Spotify USA Inc. 79. Square, Inc. 80. Squarespace, Inc. 81. Strava, Inc. 82. Stripe, Inc. 83. SurveyMonkey Inc. 84. TaskRabbit, Inc 85. Tech:NYC 86. Thumbtack, Inc. 87. Turn Inc. 88. Twilio Inc. 89. Twitter Inc. 90. Turn Inc. 91. Uber Technologies, Inc. 92. Via 93. Wikimedia Foundation, Inc. 94. Workday 95. Y Combinator Management, LLC 96. Yelp Inc. 97. Zynga Inc.

(Forbes)