The legal fight over Trump’s executive order

Sunday, Feb. 5: Read 97 tech companies’ brief against Trump’s travel ban

This is an “amicus,” or friend of the court, brief filed by 97 lead­ing tech­no­logy com­pan­ies, ar­guing against the Trump ad­min­is­tra­tion’s ban on travel for cit­izens of sev­en mostly Muslim coun­tries. The com­pan­ies com­prise a who’s who of the In­ter­net eco­nomy and in­clude Apple, Mi­crosoft, Google, Face­book, Twit­ter, Uber, Ly­ft, Airb­nb, eBay, Net­flix, Snap, Spo­ti­fy and Yelp. They ar­gue that the Court of Ap­peals should not grant the gov­ern­ment an ap­peal of the or­der halt­ing the travel ban, which they say is un­con­sti­tu­tion­al, un­fair and “in­flict­ing sub­stan­tial harm on U.S. com­pan­ies.”

“People who choose to leave everything that is fa­mil­i­ar and jour­ney to an un­known land to make a new life ne­ces­sar­ily are en­dowed with drive, cre­ativ­ity, de­term­in­a­tion — and just plain guts,” the brief says, us­ing un­char­ac­ter­ist­ic­ally plain-spoken lan­guage for a leg­al doc­u­ment. “The en­ergy they bring to Amer­ica is a key reas­on why the Amer­ic­an eco­nomy has been the greatest en­gine of prosper­ity and in­nov­a­tion in his­tory.”