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Article

20 Jun 2018

Author:
Jena McGregor, Washington Post

CEOs are calling the separation of children and families at the border ‘inhumane’ and ‘tragic’

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... [T]ech CEOs, including Uber's Dara Khosrowshahi‏, Twitter's Jack Dorsey and Google's Sundar Pichai weighed in [regarding the Trump Administration's practice of separating families] with tweets, and Johnson & Johnson CEO Alex Gorsky called for "an immediate end to the policy." Goldman Sachs CEO Lloyd Blankfein called it "tragic" while saying "it’s easy to say what you would do if you didn’t have to bear the consequences for what you decided." Business Roundtable immigration committee chair Chuck Robbins, CEO of Cisco Systems, said in a tweet that the practice was "cruel and contrary to American values."

... Observers who study the recent wave of "CEO activism"... say Corporate America has been slower to respond to the current crisis than to past ones... According to data tracked by the communications firm Weber Shandwick, 153 CEOs and companies spoke out about the travel ban early last year, and 62 companies made remarks supporting the "Dreamers" last fall... [O]n the issue of the separation of children and parents at the border, Leslie Gaines-Ross, Weber Shandwick's chief reputation strategist, said..."I’m a bit surprised that so few companies have spoken up at this point."... She and others point to several possible reasons the issue didn't take hold with companies as quickly... One could be because the separation of children and families raises moral questions, and it's harder for companies to issue the kind of lawyer-scrubbed statements about corporate values like diversity, equality or sustainability that many have used before... Business contracts with Immigration and Customs Enforcement have complicated the matter for some. Microsoft faced outrage from some on social media for saying it was "proud to support" ICE's I.T. modernization in a January blog post. It followed up with a statement, which read in part: "In response to questions we want to be clear: Microsoft is not working with U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement or U.S. Customs and Border Protection on any projects related to separating children from their families at the border.

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