On Thursday during an all-hands meeting at Apple, CEO Tim Cook spoke about lobbying to U.S. elected officials on behalf of immigrants. He claimed he “will personally advocate for” Apple employees who are part of the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (DACA) program for undocumented immigrants, and that he will “continue to lobby lawmakers,” about immigration.
Cook is quoted as having said Apple has “been a smarter, wiser, more innovative company because we’ve attracted the best and brightest from all corners of the world.”
Some of Donald Trump’s biggest fans have occasionally differed with the president about immigration. At the height of the MAGA switcheroo in Silicon Valley shortly after Donald Trump’s second election in 2024, some right-wing tech billionaires broke with the Republican party line at the time by speaking up for employees who were part of the highly lucrative H-1B visa program. Despite being nominally pro-immigration at the time, their stances were often impossible to mistake for compassion.
Elon Musk notably weighed in, which was a big part of the schism between Musk and Steve Bannon that persists to this day. Musk posted on X in response to another post implying that the market requires immigration, saying “There is a permanent shortage of excellent engineering talent. It is the fundamental limiting factor in Silicon Valley.” Vivek Ramaswamy, who was briefly Musk’s peer at the top of the DOGE org chart, claimed in a long, strange X post that American cultural decadence requires employees to seek what he perceives to be superior human specimens abroad—superior culturally, not genetically.
Late last month, Cook wrote about a need for “deescalation” in Minneapolis during a sudden outcry from conservatives and fellow tech elites who are cozy with Trump over the overreach by federal immigration agents after they killed two American citizens in that city. Notably, Cook himself attended a screening of the documentary Melania at the White House in the hours after Pretti’s killing. While there have not been additional protester deaths in Minneapolis since those of Renee Good and Alex Pretti, very little deescalation appears to have been achieved. Despite removing 700 ICE and border patrol agents from the area, 2,000 reportedly remain, and 42 Minneapolis area protesters were taken into custody on Saturday.
And although Trump did at one point call Cook “Tim Apple” he has also stated that he considers the Apple CEO to be “a friend of mine.” At a notorious White House meeting in summer of last year—which was well after the Big-Tech-kisses-the-ring days right around the start of Trump 2.0—Cook gifted Trump a one-of-a-kind Apple-fabricated glass disc thing that rests in what Cook purports to be an absolutely massive hunk of 24-karat gold.
But as Bloomberg notes, on Thursday Cook claimed to be “deeply distraught” about immigration in the U.S. “I’ve heard from some of you that don’t feel comfortable leaving your homes,” he apparently said, and added “No one should feel this way. No one.”
“I love you if you’re on DACA,” Cook reportedly said to his employees at one point.
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