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

Over 1,400 Salesforce employees have signed a letter calling on CEO Marc Benioff to drop potential business with the U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement agency, two people familiar with the effort told CNBC.

“We are deeply troubled by recent press reports describing Salesforce pitches of AI technology to U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) to help the agency ‘expeditiously’ hire 10,000 new agents and vet tip-line reports,” the letter reads.

The letter calls on Benioff to cancel “all active pitches or ‘opportunities’ for ICE enforcement and hiring” and issue a public statement demanding the removal of masked agents in U.S. cities.

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

Earlier on Tuesday, Benioff joked about ICE being present at an employee gathering in Las Vegas, 404 Media reported. The incident led employees to criticize the comments in an internal Slack forum, the two people told CNBC.

Letter signatories are asking Salesforce to tell workers what kinds of services it is providing to ICE and “pause or prohibit infrastructure, AI systems or services that enable ICE operational scale-up.”

“We are concerned that Salesforce products and services may be enabling ICE to expand recruitment, onboarding and operational capacity,” reads a supplementary document to the letter, which CNBC viewed. The document cited an October New York Times report saying that Salesforce described its software as an “ideal platform” for ICE agent recruitment in a response to a request for information.

The letter from employees comes at a difficult time for the company. Investors have been concerned about the possibility of AI models hurting the growth prospects of software companies, including Salesforce. Its 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 between 9% and 10% in the current fiscal year, which would be up slightly.

Wired reported about the letter earlier Tuesday. Salesforce did not immediately provide comment.

The letter from Salesforce employees comes after 900 Google employees asked their company to divest itself from ICE and U.S. Customs and Border Protection as of last week. Business leaders including Apple CEO Tim Cook have also decried the behavior of ICE agents in clashes with protesters.

“Employees face real personal and professional risk when Salesforce is perceived as enabling ICE, including reputational harm, social targeting or being misidentified as complicit in activities they oppose,” the supplement reads. “At the same time, employees cannot make informed decisions about their work when the scope, governance and boundaries of Salesforce’s relationship with ICE are opaque.”

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

The letter credits Benioff for saying in October that he did not believe the National Guard needed to deploy to San Francisco, where Salesforce has its headquarters and holds its annual Dreamforce conference. One week earlier, The New York Times reported that Benioff supported President Donald Trump’s idea of bringing troops to the city.

In May, the U.S. General Services Administration said Salesforce offered discounts on Slack, its team communication software, to a slew of government agencies. Adobe, Microsoft and ServiceNow also extended price cuts for use of their software across the U.S. government.

In October, Benioff held a conversation with Trump’s artificial intelligence and cryptocurrency czar, David Sacks, and in November, the Salesforce CEO attended a dinner with the president at the White House alongside other technology executives. He posted a photo of himself with Attorney General Pam Bondi on X.

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