After his failure to denounce President Trump’s immigration ban was met with a scorching #DeleteUber campaign, Uber CEO Travis Kalanick today vowed to set up a $3 million legal defense fund for affected drivers, in addition to other promises. He also lightly criticized the ban, calling it “unjust.”
“At Uber we’ve always believed in standing up for what’s right,” Kalanick wrote on Facebook. “Today we need your help supporting drivers who may be impacted by the President’s unjust immigration ban.”
He repeated his pledge to compensate those drivers stuck overseas by the immigration ban, and promised to dispatch Uber’s “lawyers and immigration experts” to provide “24/7 legal support.” In addition, Kalanick said that Uber would “urge the government to reinstate the right of U.S. residents to travel — whatever their country of origin — immediately.”
Kalanick’s pledges follow a blistering response from people on Twitter and elsewhere to his original statement on Trump’s immigration ban, as well as Uber’s decision to continue serving JFK airport during a reported taxi strike. Kalanick was targeted personally for his involvement in a Trump advisory council comprised of a handful of prominent CEOs from tech and business. The hashtag #DeleteUber — in which people posted screenshots of themselves deleting the Uber app or their Uber accounts — quickly began trending.
To make matters worse for Uber, the company’s arch rival Lyft issued a more forceful statement against the immigration ban, and the company’s chief executives announced their intention to donate $1 million to the American Civil Liberties Union. Lyft’s response was among one of the strongest from Silicon Valley to Trump’s controversial executive order.
“So here again Uber is its own worst enemy,” Brishen Rogers, an assistant professor of law at Temple University, who has written about ride-hailing services told The Verge. “If they’d refused to work with Trump and taken a stand against the executive order I don’t think they’d be having this issue. Lyft is just doing a much better job at understanding public opinion and headline risk.”
