Walt Disney Co. CEO Bob Iger weighed in on President Trump’s decision to rescind an Obama-era program to allow young undocumented immigrants to remain in the country.
“The Dreamers impacted by this cruel and misguided decision make significant contributions to our economy and our country, and I urge Congress to take immediate bipartisan action to pass legislation that will protect these innocent people,” Iger said in a statement.
Iger resigned from a White House advisory council in June in protest of the decision to pull out of the Paris climate accords.
Attorney General Jeff Sessions announced on Tuesday the ending of former President Barack Obama’s 2012 executive order to allow children of undocumented immigrants to remain in the country, under certain conditions. The number of those affected by the decision is almost 800,000.
A spokesman for the company did not return calls for additional comment. It’s unclear just how many Disney employees are in the DACA program or what steps the company planned to take if they face deportation.
Just after Trump made his announcement, such tech executives as Facebook’s Mark Zuckerberg and Apple’s Tim Cook weighed in. Cook said that 250 Apple employees were Dreamers, as those who came to the U.S. as children are known, and wrote that the company “will fight for them to be treated as equals.”
Last week, Zuckerberg and Cook signed their names to an open letter calling on Trump to retain the program, and they were joined by other corporate figures such as Barry Diller, AT&T’s Randall Stephenson and Casey Wasserman. Later on Tuesday, Viacom CEO Bob Bakish added his name to the list.
Spokespersons for Time Warner, Comcast, 21st Century Fox and Sony did not return requests for comment.
Microsoft, meanwhile, said that it would pay legal costs of any employee who is threatened with deportation.
“We will also file an amicus brief and explore whether we can directly intervene in any such case,” Microsoft’s president, Brad Smith, wrote in a blog post. “In short, if Dreamers who are our employees are in court, we will be by their side.”
Iger has been an advocate for immigration reform. In 2010, he joined a coalition called the Partnership for a New American Economy advocating for immigration reform, including a route to legal status for undocumented individuals currently in the U.S.
