Apple CEO Tim Cook asks the Supreme Court to save DACA

Apple CEO Tim Cook at Oktoberfest 2019 in Germany. | Gisela Schober/Getty Images

The Supreme Court is slated to hear arguments in November on whether Trump’s decision to end DACA was legal.

Apple CEO Tim Cook, along with the company’s Senior Vice President Deirdre O’Brien, filed a Supreme Court brief on Wednesday to personally voice support for Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (DACA), an immigration program that President Trump tried to terminate in 2017 but that has been kept alive through a series of court appeals.

The Supreme Court is slated hear arguments in November on whether Trump’s decision to end DACA was legal.

Since it was established by President Barack Obama in 2012, DACA has protected about 800,000 young adult unauthorized immigrants from deportation and has allowed them to legally work in the US.

While this is the first time Cook has put his own name on a brief, he and Apple have long supported Dreamers (as DACA recipients are called), 443 of which work at Apple, according to the brief.

“We did not hire them out of kindness or charity. We did it because Dreamers embody Apple’s innovation strategy,” Cook wrote in the brief.

During Trump’s meetings with the tech industry in 2017, Cook urged Trump to show compassion for Dreamers. Cook and Apple have also spoken out against changes to immigration visas for highly skilled tech workers.

Previous efforts to pass DACA bills in Congress didn’t go anywhere. As Vox’s Nicole Narea wrote earlier this month:

Although there is substantial bipartisan support for protecting DACA recipients, further debate in Congress is likely a dead end for now, and there’s no guarantee that Congress will take the issue up if the Court decides Trump’s decision to end the program was legal. After substantial deliberation, Congress had tried and failed to pass compromise legislation last year. Democrats in the House passed a bill to protect DACA recipients in June, but Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell said he would not likely bring the bill to a vote on the floor.

You can read the full brief from Cook and O’Brien here: