Twitter and other major technology companies planned to file a friend-of-the-court brief Sunday night with a federal appeals court hearing challenges to President Donald Trump’s executive order on immigration.
A spokesperson for Twitter told NBC News that the final language of the filing, known in legalese as an amicus curiae brief, was being finished with plans to file it later in the evening in the 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals in San Francisco.
Related: Silicon Valley’s Visceral Reaction to Trump’s Immigration Ban
The appeals court earlier Sunday rejected the Trump administration’s request to reinstate the president’s order restricting entry into the United States by travelers from seven majority Muslim countries. A federal district judge in Seattle halted implementation of the order on Friday.
Some tech giants, including Amazon.com Inc. and Expedia Inc., filed briefs in connection with that case early last week, arguing that Trump’s order negatively affects their businesses.
An estimated 37.4 percent of Silicon Valley employees are foreign born, according to the 2016 Silicon Valley Index (PDF) released by think tank Joint Venture.
(NBC News is a division of NBCUniversal, which is owned by Comcast Corp., the nation’s largest cable provider. Comcast technology employees in Philadelphia staged a workplace demonstration against Trump’s order last week. It wasn’t immediately clear Sunday night whether Comcast or any of its divisions are involved in the new court brief.)
