“The tremendous impact of immigrants on America — and on American business — is not happenstance,” the companies wrote in the brief, filed in the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit, in San Francisco. “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 energy they bring to America is a key reason why the American economy has been the greatest engine of prosperity and innovation in history.”

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Google employees listen to speakers during their protest of President Trump’s immigration… more

VIVEK V. MISTRY

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A federal judge on Friday halted Trump’s executive order, which barred travel by citizens of seven Muslim-majority countries for 90 days and suspended the refugee program for 120 days. The administration has a deadline later today to argue why the judge’s order should be reversed.

In all, 97 companies signed the legal brief. These notably included Apple, Google, eBay, Facebook, Intel, Microsoft, Netflix, Salesforce, Twitter, and Uber. Cisco, Oracle, and Tesla were conspicuously absent from the list.

The brief noted that more than 200 companies on the Fortune 500 list were founded by immigrants or the children of immigrants. Silicon Valley’s two biggest companies, Apple and Google, are included in that list. Since 2000, more than a third of American Nobel prize winners in chemistry, medicine and physics have been immigrants.

The Trump administration has signaled that it may continue to squeeze Silicon Valley on immigration, possibly by changing the structure of the H-1B visa program, which admitted 85,000 highly-skilled workers into the U.S. last year.

In December, executives from 12 technology companies met with Trump and a small circle of his advisors to talk about issues important to the group. Seven of the 12 companies either signed Sunday’s legal brief or filed one of their own.