Googlers Protest Against Trump’s Immigration Ban, Sundar Pichai and Sergey Brin Join

Over 2,000 Google employees joined the protest against President Donald Trump’s executive order that bans immigration from seven Muslim countries today. Employees from Mountain View, San Francisco, New York and Seattle campuses participated against the immigration ban.

Google CEO Sundar Pichai and co-founder Sergey Brin spoke at the rally in Mountain View.

Google has created a crisis fund and it is going to donate up to $4 million for four immigrant rights organizations. The initial $2 million will go toward the American Civil Liberties Union, the Immigrant Legal Resource Center, the International Rescue Committee and the U.N. Refugee Agency. The remaining fund will be donated by Google employees. Google also said in a statement that it’s concerned about the impact this executive order will have on the company’s employees and their families.

Google employees tweeted out pictures etc from the rally with #GooglersUnite.

“I see many leads from Google here today,” Pichai told the crowd at Google’s Mountain View headquarters. “We spent two hours this morning talking about all of this. There’s a lot of work which remains to be done. I think it’s important we stay the course and achieve an outcome. I think to do that we all need to learn to reach out and communicate to people from across the country. And I think it’s really important with anything like that we take the extra step to reach out, to have a dialogue and that’s what leads to right outcomes too. But really I think today is about hearing from other voices. We’ve spoken up but I think it’s great to hear the stories so hopefully there will be more and the fight will continue.”

Brin remarked how he first came to the U.S. at the age of six with his family from the Soviet Union, “which was at that time, you know, the greatest enemy the U.S. had,” Brin said.

He went on to say that it was a dire period of the Cold War and that the Soviet Union was under the threat of nuclear annihilation and “yet, even then, the U.S. had the courage to take me and my family in as refugees.”

According to sources, Alphabet CFO Ruth Porat sent out an email to some administrative employees, who then forwarded it to other employees, encouraging them to join the protest.