Salesforce CEO Marc Benioff ‘joked’ with employees who had traveled to the United States for a Salesforce all-hands meeting that Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents were in the building keeping tabs on them, 404 Media has learned.
Multiple employees told 404 Media about the joke, and 404 Media obtained internal Slack chats showing employees discussing it. Benioff was giving the opening keynote at the Salesforce CKO event in Las Vegas on Tuesday, which is a major Salesforce meeting ‘kicking off’ its strategy for the year. In his keynote, Benioff thanked international employees for traveling to the United States for the meeting, and asked them to stand. Benioff then said that ICE agents were in the building to keep tabs on them.
The comments instantly became a major topic of conversation on Saleforce’s internal Slack, with shocked employees trying to figure out if they had misheard the CEO. One employee asked “what was the ice joke?” Another employee responded “If you’re visiting from outside the United States, please stand … ICE is keeping track of that.” Another said the joke was “Please stand if you traveled here from abroad! Thank you! Just so the ICE agents know.” And a third wrote that the joke was, “roughly, ‘Please everyone stand who traveled here internationally.’ And then while they are still standing, ‘there are ICE agents in the hall to keep tabs on you.’”
“The room groaned,” one employee wrote on Slack. “We couldn’t believe he said that.”
Salesforce’s contracts with ICE have been controversial within the company, which is part of why employees weren’t happy with Benioff’s joke.
San Francisco’s Gazetteer first reported on Benioff’s remarks.
This is an example of “Silicon Valley CEOs and their inability to divorce ICE and the complete lack of understanding of why that makes them monsters,” a Salesforce employee told 404 Media. “Employees are going absolutely apeshit in internal Slack about how completely awful it was.” Another employee told 404 Media that Benioff “then followed it up with a joke about not understanding the message of Bad Bunny’s Super Bowl performance. On its own just seems out of touch, but coupled with the previous joke it does seem worse.”
In a Slack channel called “#airing-of-grievances,” employees posted a meme of a Nazi officer that read “Are we the baddies?” Another wrote “Serious question: would a statement of apology/recognition/whatever by someone (anyone) actually do anything at this point? Or has a rubicon of sorts been crossed?” A third wrote “It’s super uncomfortable to me that this has been glossed over like ZERO mention of hey we hear your comments and your voice matters.”
Another employee created an “ICE OUT” emoji and noted that it was a “low impact probably fluffy mini protest but I made this emoji for my status so it’s abundantly clear that I do not endorse or align with the values being joked about at this company.” More than 150 employees reacted to the message with the emoji. Another employee wrote “I literally thought I was hallucinating or misread what came out of his mouth. Disbelief and disappointment—is this how we model humanistic compassion as a world-class company? Stop talking about money and profit for a minute, ffs.”
Other employees shared links to donate to causes protecting immigrants, and another wrote “I can’t believe that the man that faced down Governor Mike Pence in the name of equality just made ICE jokes after asking international employees to stand up.”
ICE, of course, has been violently detaining and deporting undocumented immigrants across the United States. But there have also been many high-profile cases of people simply visiting the United States on tourist visas or for short-term stays being detained because of minor clerical issues or things that they had posted on their social media.
In October, Salesforce told ICE that it would be willing to allow the agency to use its AI to hire, and said the company was well-placed to help ICE “to nearly triple its work force by hiring 10,000 new officers and agents expeditiously.”
Salesforce did not immediately respond to a request for comment.