On Thursday during the all-hands meeting at AppleCEO Tim Cook spoke about lobbying US elected officials for immigrants. He admitted that he will “personally advocate for” Apple employees who are part of the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (DACA) program for undocumented immigrants, and that he will “continue to lobby lawmakers,” on immigration.

Cook is quoted as saying that Apple is “a smarter, smarter, more innovative company because we’ve attracted the best and the brightest from all over the world.”

Some of Donald Trump’s biggest fans sometimes differ with the president on immigration. At the height of MAGA switcheroo in Silicon Valley shortly after Donald Trump’s second election in 2024, several right-wing tech billionaires broke with the then-Republican party line by speaking out for employees who are part of the lucrative H-1B visa program. Despite being nominally pro-immigration at the time, their stances were often impossible to mistake for compassion.

Elon Musk weighed in heavily, which is a big part of the schism between Musk and Steve Bannon that continues to this day. Musk posted by X in response to another post implying that the market needs immigration, saying “There is a permanent shortage of excellent engineering talent. This is the fundamental limiting factor in Silicon Valley.” Vivek Ramaswamy, who was briefly Musk’s partner at the top of the DOGE org chart, claims a long, awesome X post that the decay of American culture required employees to seek what he thought were the best human specimens abroad—culturally superior, not genetically.

Last month, Cook wrote about it a demand for “deescalation” in Minneapolis during a sudden outcry from conservatives and co tech elites comfortable with Trump because of the overreach of federal immigration agents after they killed two American citizens in that city. Especially, Cook himself attended a screening of the documentary Melania at the White House in the hours after Pretti’s murder. Although there have been no additional deaths of protesters in Minneapolis since Renee Good and Alex Pretti, little de-escalation appears to have been achieved. Despite removing 700 ICE and border patrol agents from the area, 2,000 are reported to remainand 42 protesters in the Minneapolis area were arrested on Saturday.

And even if Trump at one point calling Cook “Tim Apple” he also stated that he considered the Apple CEO “my friend.” In a famous White House meeting last summer—which was after the Big-Tech-kisses-the-ring days of the start of Trump 2.0—Cook gave Trump a one-of-a-kind Apple-fabricated glass disc item that’s in what Cook says is a perfectly large hunk of 24-karat gold.

but as Bloomberg noteson Thursday Cook admitted to being “very sad” about immigration in the US “I have heard from some of you who are not comfortable leaving your homes,” he said openly, adding “No one should feel this way. No one.”

“I love you when you’re on DACA,” Cook told his employees at one point.