Microsoft president Brad Smith said Tuesday that the federal government needs to take “urgent” action to fix the Obama-era rule that lets children of undocumented immigrants who grew up in the U.S. Stay in the country following the Trump administration’s decision to rescind the law.
Earlier in the day, U.S. Attorney General Jeff Sessions announced that the administration would roll back protections under the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals, or DACA. In effect, that means that 800,000 children could be deported to countries they may never have been to.
The Trump administration has given Congress six months to deal with this issue.
Microsoft is “deeply disappointed” by the administration’s decision, Smith wrote in a blog post, and pushed Congress to move fast to deal with the situation. Given the six-month deadline, Smith urged Congress to make fixing DACA a priority over tax reform and other legislation the administration has said it wants to push.
Legislation to protect 800,000 #Dreamers is an economic & humanitarian imperative. Congress needs to act quickly. Https://t.co/XZi4M7HYfC
— Brad Smith (@BradSmi) September 5, 2017
Last week, Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella also weighed in against any move to roll back DACA. He was hardly alone: CEOs from 400 other U.S. Companies including Apple (AAPL), IBM (IBM), and Wells Fargo (WFC) issued similar statements.
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Microsoft (MSFT) employs 39 “dreamers,” as people who are in this country as a result of DACA are called.
“We appreciate that Dreamers add to the competitiveness and economic success of our company and the entire nation’s business community,” Smith wrote.
