Google employees protested against Trump’s immigration ban

On Monday, thousands of Google employees staged protests over Donald Trump, the US President's executive order on immigration. They took to protests revealing the rising tension between the new administration and technology industry.

Over 2000 employees of Alphabet Inc., Google's parent took part in the rally across several offices. At the headquarters located in Mountain View, Sundar Pichai, the CEO of Google and co-founder Sergey Brin, both being immigrants spoke to the protesters voicing out their concerns over the order Trump has imposed limiting travel to the US from seven countries with Muslim majority.

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This order, which was signed on Friday, is criticized by several tech companies. Sundar Pichai sent a note to the employees the very same day saying 187 employees of the country were potentially affected due to this order. Google asked the employees overseas to return as soon as possible and pledged to help them with the logistics and in handling the costs.

Some Google employees who are affected by this order addressed the crowd along with Brin and Pichai. One of them was a product manager at Google, Soufi Esmaeilzadeh, an Iranian-born Canadian. She was preparing to return to the US where she has been working for 15 years from Switzerland when the news broke in. She had contacted the internet immigration team at Google to check if the trip should be ended early. The team got back to her explaining the situation and asked Esmaeilzadeh not to return right now as she might be deported instantly.

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Later, Google's lawyers asked her to fly to San Francisco from Switzerland. The immigration order imposed by Trump was temporarily blocked by a federal judge.

Many people at Google had come up with concerns about the response of the company to Trump's policy at a meeting on Thursday, a day before signing the order. This disruption comes at a crucial time for Google.