Salesforce employees call on CEO Benioff to cancel ICE ‘opportunities’

over 1,400 sales force Employees signed a letter urging CEO Marc Benioff to abandon potential work with U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement, two people familiar with the effort told CNBC.

“We are deeply troubled by recent press reports describing Salesforce offering AI technology to U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) to help the agency ‘quickly’ hire 10,000 new agents and review tip line reports,” the letter says.

The letter calls on Benioff to “rescind all active sites or ‘opportunities’ for ICE enforcement and recruitment” and to issue a press release demanding the removal of masked agents in U.S. cities.

The Salesforce employee letter is the latest example of tech workers voicing concerns about the U.S. agency’s use of their company’s services after ICE agents killed U.S. citizens Renee Nicole Good and Alex Pretti in Minnesota in January.

Earlier Tuesday, Benioff joked about ICE’s presence at an employee meeting in Las Vegas, 404 Media reported. The incident led to employees criticizing the comments in an internal Slack forum, two people told CNBC.

The letter’s signatories want Salesforce to tell workers what types of services it provides to ICE and to “pause or prohibit infrastructure, AI systems or services that enable ICE’s operational scaling.”

“We are concerned that Salesforce products and services may enable ICE to expand its recruiting, hiring and operational capacity,” reads a document accompanying the letter viewed by CNBC. The document referred to October New York Times The report noted that Salesforce, in response to a request for information, described its software as an “ideal platform” for ICE agent recruiting.

The letter from the employees comes at a difficult time for the company. Investors are concerned that AI models could hurt the growth prospects of software companies, including Salesforce. The stock is down about 27% so far in 2026. In December, the company touted its work with the U.S. government and called for growth of 9% to 10% in the current fiscal year, which could be a slight increase.

Salesforce had no immediate comment.

The letter from Salesforce employees comes after 900 Google employees asked their company to leave ICE and U.S. Customs and Border Protection as of last week. Including business leaders Apple CEO Tim Cook also condemned the behavior of ICE agents in clashes with protesters.

“When Salesforce is perceived to enable ICE, employees face real personal and professional risks, including reputational damage, social targeting, or being misidentified as complicit in activities they oppose,” the addendum states. “At the same time, when the scope, management, and boundaries of Salesforce’s relationship with ICE are not transparent, employees cannot make informed decisions about their work.”

Organizers plan to send the letter to Benioff by Friday, according to the document.

The letter credits Benioff with saying in October: I didn’t believe The National Guard was supposed to deploy to San Francisco, where Salesforce is headquartered and holds its annual Dreamforce conference. A week ago New York Times reported Benioff said he supports President Donald Trump’s idea of ​​bringing troops to the city.

In May, the US General Services Administration announced that Salesforce discounts offered We’ve rolled out team communication software Slack to a number of government agencies. Adobe, Microsoft And ServiceNow it also extended price discounts for use of its software across the US government.

Benioff in October a speech Trump’s AI and cryptocurrency czar David Sacks and Salesforce CEO in November attended a dinner with the president at the White House along with other tech executives. He posted a photo of himself with Attorney General Pam Bondi in x.

“Marc, you have often said that ‘business is the greatest platform for change,'” the letter reads. “Today, this platform should be used to defend the constitutional rights of our neighbors and the safety of our communities.”