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Apple, Microsoft, Uber and other tech giants are rising to the defense of Dreamers

A report card on the tech industry’s early lobbying efforts on DACA.

Acitvists hold “Defend DACA” signs at a rally against President Trump’s decision to deport Dreamers.
Acitvists hold “Defend DACA” signs at a rally against President Trump’s decision to deport Dreamers.
Eduardo Munoz Alvarez/Getty Images

Apple, Amazon, Facebook, Microsoft and Uber each are providing legal aid to employees affected by President Donald Trump’s decision to unwind a federal program that spares undocumented young adults from deportation.

In addition, Amazon and Microsoft have joined court cases challenging the White House’s move to end DACA, as its known, while Uber said it’s currently in discussions about ways it can be involved in legal battles going forward.

Recode surveyed 10 tech giants about their efforts to preserve Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals. We sent Apple, Amazon, Facebook, Google, IBM, Intel, Microsoft, Oracle, Twitter and Uber six questions last week about their future lobbying efforts in defense of the program.

Here’s how they responded:

Report card showing ow tech companies are responding to the DACA decision

Implemented under President Barack Obama in 2012, DACA had allowed those brought to the United States illegally as children to continue living here, while obtaining work authorization, without fear of deportation. Many of them work at tech companies, an industry that has encouraged more immigration to help fill its ranks.

To that end, most tech companies joined more than 400 other businesses signing an open letter to Trump earlier this month urging him to preserve DACA and protect its roughly 800,000 beneficiaries, known as Dreamers. Three did not: IBM, Intel and Oracle.

Some companies are more forthcoming about their political plans than others. At Microsoft, where 39 employees are affected by Trump’s new policy, the software giant has pledged to lobby Congress to make DACA protections permanent. And Microsoft told Recode it would factor support for DACA into its decision-making process for donating money toward lawmakers’ re-election campaigns.

Facebook, however, declined to share much about its approach toward restoring DACA in the coming months — even though its leader, Mark Zuckerberg, has advocated for the program personally and through the group FWD.us.

The social giant declined to say, for example, precisely how many Facebook employees are even affected by Trump’s plans to end deportation protections.

Others, like Amazon, called on Congress to advance a law that makes DACA permanent — but declined to elaborate as to whether they would task their high-octane, well-funded lobbyists in the nation’s capital toward advancing that goal.

And not one of the 10 companies surveyed committed to sending their chief executives to Washington, D.C., in the coming weeks to lobby the White House and Congress to restore the program.

Three companies did not respond to our survey questions at all: Google, Intel and Oracle. Twitter responded but declined to answer them specifically. All four previously have stressed the importance of DACA.

(We will update this story if and when companies respond to survey questions.)


This article originally appeared on Recode.net.

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