Marc Benioff’s newly public support for President Donald Trump isn’t just gum-flapping. Salesforce, the CEO’s gigantic San Francisco company, has reportedly been lobbying Immigration and Customs Enforcement to try and win a contract — and use artificial intelligence to help ICE dramatically expand its violent crackdown.
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Benioff apologizes for much-despised National Guard comments
FILE: Marc Benioff attends a Time magazine event on October 24, 2023 in New York City.
It’s a revelation that comes amid a wave of attention on Benioff, who recanted his recently espoused support for sending the National Guard into San Francisco in a post to X on Friday. He wrote that he no longer supports it: “My earlier comment came from an abundance of caution around the [Dreamforce] event, and I sincerely apologize for the concern it caused.”
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The New York Times, on Thursday, published leaks that Salesforce did not contest. The documentation shows a multi-pronged effort by the company to aid ICE in conducting the raids, abductions and deportations that have become the cornerstone of Trump’s anti-immigration campaign. A Salesforce memo to the agency, sent Aug. 26, reportedly described it as an “ideal platform” to help ICE meet its “talent acquisition” goal: “nearly triple its work force by hiring 10,000 new officers and agents expeditiously.”
In the same memo, Salesforce pledged that it could help ICE, “identify, engage and acquire the talent profile proven to drive ICE mission success, and in turn, administration priorities,” the Times reported. Chatting in an ICE-focused internal Slack channel about the pitch, a Salesforce employee reportedly wrote that the document was “out the door,” and got a chorus of praise: fire emojis, an “amazing” and an, “I wish you the best of luck with this one!”
It isn’t clear what the contract would be worth, or whether Salesforce is on track to win it. Neither the company nor the Department of Homeland Security, which oversees ICE, responded to SFGATE’s request for comment. But the Times also reported that Salesforce has brainstormed ideas about how the company’s artificial intelligence agents could help the agency vet tips and aid investigations, and that it has a spreadsheet of possible ICE contracts, dubbed “opportunities.” The spreadsheet reportedly listed some contracts with ICE that are already completed.
While the Times pointed out that Salesforce worked with the agency during the Obama and Biden administrations, and that it works with other government departments, the attempt to serve ICE’s rapid expansion comes amid a new directive for the agency. Trump and the Republican-led Congress, this summer, gave ICE an additional $30 billion for arrest and deportation efforts — including hiring — and $45 billion for detentions. The flood of cash comes as Trump and other administration officials pressure ICE to make far more arrests, including with a daily quota. As of a September story from the Guardian, the agency had already detained or deported more than 44,000 immigrants.
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Federal law enforcement agents confront demonstrators outside of an immigrant processing center on September 27, 2025 in Broadview, Illinois. They were protesting a recent surge in ICE apprehensions in the Chicago area.
The upending of American life has rippled outward across families, communities and industries as ICE turns aggression into a week-to-week norm. The stories are grim and abundant: the worker who fell during an ICE raid in Southern California and later died, the Chicago-area pastor shot with a pepper spray ball, three deaths in ICE custody in 12 days and a Mexican immigrant shot and killed during a traffic stop. An expansion of ICE’s workforce, with Salesforce’s aid or without, would enable raids across a much broader swath of the country.
Benioff, who owns Time magazine, told the New York Times last week that he had not closely followed news about immigration raids, in an interview where he also said, “I fully support the president. I think he’s doing a great job.”
Unsurprisingly, the perspective landed him in hot water. Ron Conway, a famed Silicon Valley venture capitalist, has reportedly left the nonprofit Salesforce Foundation’s board because of Benioff’s call, in that Times interview, for National Guard troops to act as San Francisco police. Conway wrote, per reports, that he was “shocked and disappointed” by the comments and “by [Benioff’s] willful ignorance and detachment from the impacts of the ICE immigration raids of families with NO criminal record.”
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Laurene Powell Jobs also sounded off against Benioff in a Thursday op-ed published by the Wall Street Journal. The philanthropist and investor skewered the CEO’s boasts about his donations to the city, and accused him of giving to get “a license to impose one’s will. It’s a kind of moral laundering, where so-called benevolence masks self-interest.”
The backlash appears to have gotten through, as Benioff’s Friday apology on X, a day after the company’s 2025 Dreamforce conference ended, depicted a chastised CEO. He wrote: “Having listened closely to my fellow San Franciscans and our local officials, and after the largest and safest Dreamforce in our history, I do not believe the National Guard is needed to address safety in San Francisco.”
Benioff, in years past, has been a well-known contributor to progressive causes, including a tax on San Francisco corporations to contribute to funding for homelessness services. He’s also been a major advocate of “business as a platform for change,” touting donations and his company’s policy of pledging 1% of worker time toward equity and sustainability.
But with his statements to the Times and the outlet’s ICE reporting, that public image quickly evaporated. Benioff’s original National Guard comments prompted a wave of irritation from local officials, who sought to balance Salesforce’s economic benefits to the city with the unpopular idea of outside troops, which Trump supported at a press conference on Wednesday. There’s no doubt that Benioff’s update on X brought a sigh of relief.
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San Francisco Supervisor Shamann Walton, who represents District 10, said in a statement to SFGATE on Friday, before Benioff’s apology: “I think it is sad that someone who once held progressive values, supported our SFUSD schools and fought to address homelessness, has now become someone who supports tyranny and has become a voice for bashing our beautiful city.”
Work at Salesforce or another Bay Area tech company and want to talk? Contact tech reporter Stephen Council securely at stephen.council@sfgate.com or on Signal at 628-204-5452.
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The maker of Canvas, the software used by thousands of schools and universities around the world, said on Monday that it had reached a deal with the hackers that recently breached its systems for the return of stolen data and the destruction of any copies.
ShinyHunters, a hacking group, had claimed responsibility for the attack on Instructure, the Salt Lake City-based company that provides Canvas to about half of all colleges and universities in North America.
The hackers said they had accessed the data of more than 275 million users at nearly 9,000 schools worldwide, including private conversations between students and teachers as well as personal identifying information such as names and email addresses. Canvas was shut down for hours after the cyberattack on Thursday.
The agreement, Instructure said in a statement, involved the return of the stolen data and confirmation that the data had been destroyed at the hackers’ end. Instructure added that it had been informed that none of its customers would face extortion as a result of the theft.
“While there is never complete certainty when dealing with cybercriminals, we believe it was important to take every step within our control to give customers additional peace of mind, to the extent possible,” the company said.
Instructure did not say what it had given the hackers in exchange for the return of the data. The company did not immediately respond to questions about the deal.
Canvas has more than 30 million active users around the world, according to Instructure. The platform is used by teachers and students for coursework management and communications. Instructure said the data compromised in the hack included usernames, email addresses, course names, enrollment information and messages.
ShinyHunters on Thursday claimed the attack in a message that appeared on students’ Canvas pages and was obtained by The New York Times. The group warned that it would leak an unspecified amount of data on May 12 if it did not receive a response from Instructure. In its May 3 ransom note, the group had threatened to leak “several billions of private messages among students and teachers.”
Not much is known about ShinyHunters, which is believed to have been formed around 2020. Its goal appears to be to obtain personal records and sell them. One of its high-profile attacks was against Ticketmaster in 2024, when the hackers said they had stolen the user information of more than 500 million customers.
Instructure said it first detected unauthorized activity in Canvas on Apr. 29, and again on May 7. The company said it took Canvas offline to investigate the breach, and also informed the F.B.I., the U.S. Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency and other international law enforcement partners.
Instructure did not immediately respond to questions about whether any law enforcement agencies were involved in its dealings with the hackers. The F.B.I. advises against paying ransom to hackers, saying it does not guarantee data security and encourages attackers to target more victims.
The National Quarantine Center is located at the University of Nebraska Medical Center in Omaha.
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Nebraska Medicine
Sixteen of the 18 passengers transferred to the U.S. from a cruise ship where there was an outbreak of hantavirus arrived in Omaha, Neb., on Monday for evaluation after disembarking the vessel in Spain’s Canary Islands over the weekend.
Of the 15 U.S. citizens and one dual U.S.-British citizen who arrived in Nebraska, all but one are currently being housed in the National Quarantine Unit. That patient tested positive for the virus and was being housed in the Nebraska Biocontainment Unit, officials said at a Monday news conference. The 15 people in the quarantine unit will continue to be monitored for signs of the illness.
Passengers carry their belongings in plastic bags after being evacuated from the MV Hondius after docking in the Granadilla Port on Sunday in Tenerife, part of the Canary Islands, Spain.
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Nebraska may seem an unlikely location to process these individuals, but it is home to the National Quarantine Unit — the only federally funded quarantine unit in the U.S. — and the separate Nebraska Biocontainment Unit. They are highly specialized facilities located at the University of Nebraska Medical Center (UNMC) and widely considered among the best in the world.
The $1 million, five-room biocontainment unit was dedicated in 2005. It was a joint project with Nebraska Health and Human Services and the UNMC. It is set up to safely provide medical care for patients with highly hazardous and infectious diseases and was used in 2014 to treat two doctors infected with Ebola. The National Quarantine Unit was completed in late 2019. It cost nearly $20 million, according to the Associated Press. Both facilities were used during the COVID-19 epidemic.
“We are prepared for situations exactly like this,” Dr. Michael Ash, CEO of Nebraska Medicine, said in a statement. “Our teams have trained for decades alongside federal and state partners to make sure we can safely provide care while protecting our staff and the broader community. We are proud to support this national effort.”
Two additional U.S. passengers on the cruise ship — a couple, with one showing symptoms of hantavirus — were transferred for monitoring to Emory University Hospital, where another advanced biocontainment facility is located.
When the biocontainment unit was first dedicated more than 20 years ago, the biggest concerns were anthrax attacks and severe acute respiratory syndrome, more commonly known as SARS, Dr. Phil Smith, who spearheaded the efforts at Nebraska Medical Center to create the biocontainment unit, told the AP in 2020. Smith died last year.
A hallway leading to rooms at the Nebraska Biocontainment Unit at the University of Nebraska Medical Center.
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The quarantine unit features 20 negative-pressure rooms designed to keep potentially harmful particles from escaping by maintaining lower air pressure inside than outside the rooms. The single-occupancy rooms provide patients with attached bathrooms, exercise equipment and Wi-Fi, according to the medical center.
“We have protocols in the quarantine unit that provide for safe care of these of these persons, including just all the activities of daily living so that they can … have a comfortable stay but also have it in an area that’s protected and limits spread of the pathogen,” Dr. Michael Wadman, the medical director of the National Quarantine Unit, said at a Friday news conference.
The biocontainment unit, by contrast, is a patient-care space where people are able to receive medical treatment, Dr. Angela Hewlett, medical director of the biocontainment unit, told reporters Monday.
She emphasized that the facility — which has a 10-bed capacity — operates independently from the quarantine unit and has its own dedicated air-handling system. “We don’t share [it] with any of the rest of the facility,” she said, noting that the unit uses rooftop HEPA filtration and is designed “very differently” from what most people typically imagine in a hospital setting.
One of the rooms in the Nebraska Biocontainment Unit.
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Nebraska Gov. Jim Pillen, speaking at Monday’s news conference, welcomed the recently arrived patients, who are among nearly 150 people from 23 different countries who were aboard the MV Hondius when the illness most commonly transmitted to humans through contact with infected rodents broke out. As of Monday, the World Health Organization has reported at least nine cases of hantavirus, including three deaths.
“We’re glad that you’re here,” Pillen said. “We’re going to ensure that you have the best world-class care possible.”
Pillen also sought to reassure Nebraskans that the facilities are safe and secure: “We’re working diligently to ensure no one leaves the security in an unsecured way at an inappropriate time,” he said. “No one poses a risk to public health, just walking out the front door of the streets of Omaha.”
The hantavirus outbreak on the cruise ship has been identified as the Andes strain of the illness, one that can be spread, though rarely, from person-to-person, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. It can cause severe respiratory disease, with early flu-like symptoms.
“The Andes variant of this virus does not spread easily, and it requires prolonged, close contact with someone who is already symptomatic,” according to Adm. Brian Christine, the assistant secretary for health at the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services, who spoke at Monday’s news conference. “Even so, we have taken this situation very seriously from the very start.”
“The risk of hantavirus to the general public remains very, very low,” he said.
The full quarantine period for hantavirus is 42 days, Christine said, but he added that the patients would be allowed to go home if they remained asymptomatic.
“Right now, the passengers that are all in the assessment phase — they’re going to be here for at least a few days while we do assessments and the coordination on what happens next,” he said, adding that they had the option to remain in the quarantine facility for the full period, for “the safest and most effective option for them.”
new video loaded: Americans Exposed to Hantavirus on Cruise Ship Arrive in United States
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Americans Exposed to Hantavirus on Cruise Ship Arrive in United States
Eighteen passengers who were aboard the MV Hondius, a cruise ship with a deadly hantavirus outbreak, landed in Omaha on a U.S. government medical flight. The passengers were being monitored at medical facilities in Nebraska and Georgia.
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We’re working diligently to ensure no one leaves the security in an unsecured way at an inappropriate time. No one who poses a risk to public health is walking out the front door of the streets of Omaha or beyond.
Eighteen passengers who were aboard the MV Hondius, a cruise ship with a deadly hantavirus outbreak, landed in Omaha on a U.S. government medical flight. The passengers were being monitored at medical facilities in Nebraska and Georgia.
By Axel Boada
May 11, 2026
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