Salesforce Employees Demand CEO Marc Benioff Cut Ties With ICE After Controversial Joke Sparks Backlash: Report

2 days ago 6

Namrata Sen

Thu, February 12, 2026 astatine 11:31 AM CST 3 min read

Employees at Salesforce.com Inc (NYSE:CRM) are reportedly urging CEO Marc Benioff to publically condemn the caller actions of the U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE), portion besides calling for the prohibition of Salesforce bundle by immigration agents and enactment for national authorities to betterment the agency.

An interior missive addressed to Benioff is being circulated among Salesforce employees, Wired reported connected Tuesday. During Salesforce's yearly enactment kickoff, a radical of employees organized a missive criticizing the company's reported transportation of AI tools to ICE to assistance velocity up the hiring of 10,000 agents and reappraisal tip-line reports. The employees contend that specified engagement conflicts with Salesforce's stated committedness to the ethical usage of technology.

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The missive besides highlights Benioff’s "unique value successful Washington," and urges him to usage it to contented a nationalist statement condemning ICE’s behaviour and to found “red lines” prohibiting the usage of Salesforce’s cloud and AI products for state violence.

The improvement followed an earlier study by 404 Media that the CEO faced backlash aft joking during a Las Vegas all-hands gathering that ICE agents were successful the gathering monitoring planetary employees. The remark was made portion thanking overseas unit who had traveled to the U.S.

Salesforce did not instantly respond to Benzinga's petition for comment.

There has been a increasing inclination of tech employees to instrumentality a basal against their companies’ ties with authorities agencies. Last week, implicit a thousand Google (NASDAQ:GOOGL) (NASDAQ:GOOG) employees urged the company to extremity its contracts with national migration enforcement agencies and supply much transparency connected however its exertion is utilized by these agencies.

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Meanwhile, Salesforce has been making headlines for different reasons arsenic well. A Tuesday study suggested that the institution recently trimmed its workforce amid a displacement towards AI. The institution besides named six caller oregon promoted executives to caput cardinal units, including Agentforce and Slack, replacing 5 salient leaders who person exited since December.