Mark Zuckerberg's FWD.us has had a fractious history with President Donald Trump and some of his top lieutenants, dating back to well before the election. | AP Photo Zuckerberg group that fought Trump gave to transition

At the height of the 2016 presidential campaign, the immigration reform group FWD.us took aim at then-GOP candidate Donald Trump and blasted him for pursuing policies that might lead to “mass deportations.”

But months later the nonprofit, founded by Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg wrote a $5,000 check to Trump’s presidential transition — the latest indication that it’s still business as usual for the tech industry in Washington despite the revulsion many Silicon Valley engineers and executives feel toward Trump.


Hoping to curry early favor and help shape the incoming administration, FWD.us joined a handful of tech and telecom companies like AT&T, Microsoft and Qualcomm in funding Trump’s months-long transition operation, which raked in roughly $6.5 million through Feb. 15, according to a transition disclosure report filed last weekend and obtained by POLITICO on Thursday.

The tech sector, like other industries, typically writes such checks in order to forge political bonds with a new White House. But Silicon Valley overwhelmingly opposed Trump during the presidential campaign, and in recent months, scores of tech workers in the liberal-leaning Bay Area have protested Trump’s actions in areas like immigration — and pilloried their own executives seen as cooperating with the White House.

With FWD.us, the contrast is especially stark. Since becoming president, Trump has delivered on some of Silicon Valley’s worst fears: He signed a controversial executive order in January that restricts travel from a number of Muslim countries, for example, and he’s sought to boost the government’s power to track and deport immigrants who are in the United States illegally.

Those are the very policy positions that the Zuckerberg-backed political group has sought to prevent. The leader of FWD.us, Todd Schulte, declined to comment for this story.

Founded in 2013 with the backing of Silicon Valley’s elite, FWD.us always has faced an uphill battle in Washington, where the politics of immigration reform are tough. In the wake of Trump’s election victory, though, the group appears to have tried to reorient itself in an increasingly Republican Washington. Days after Trump won, FWD.us registered its first in-house lobbyist, Mark Delich, a former aide to Sen. John McCain (R-Ariz.). In January, it tapped a new outside lobbying firm with ties House and Senate Republicans as well as the Justice Department, according to federal records.

FWD.us has had a fractious history with Trump and some of his top lieutenants, dating back to well before the election. Jeff Sessions, now the U.S. attorney general, blasted the group and its founder, Zuckerberg, in a blistering anti-immigration speech from the Senate floor in 2014. When Trump, as a candidate in 2015, detailed his immigration policy blueprint, Schulte described the approach as “just wrong.” While he didn’t mention Trump by name, the FWD.us founder took aim at “anti-immigrant voices” that seek to “forcibly expel millions of immigrants, period.”

Since Trump won the election, both sides have mostly remained at odds. After Trump signed his controversial travel ban, FWD.us decried the executive order, charging it “sets the stage for a large-scale ramp up in deportations.” Zuckerberg’s Facebook, meanwhile, joined a court challenge to Trump’s directive. But FWD.us said this month it remains “encouraged” by Trump’s positive comments about guidelines put in place by former President Barack Obama to protect undocumented immigrants whose parents brought them to the United States illegally as children.

Tech giants including Amazon, Google and Microsoft gave money to help fund Trump’s inauguration, to the consternation of many of their employees. But of those, only Microsoft gave to Trump’s transition effort, which helped finance his administration-in-waiting after the Nov. 8 election. Microsoft and Qualcomm each gave the maximum donation of $5,000, joining companies like AT&T, Citigroup, CVS, JPMorgan Chase and ExxonMobil and a slew of GOP donors, lobbyists and other individuals in funding the transition. The individual donors included Safra Catz, the Oracle chief executive who worked on the Trump transition.

Still, FWD.us wasn’t alone in criticizing Trump during the campaign, only to write a check to his transition. Warren Stephens, the Arkansas billionaire and GOP megadonor, and his wife, Harriet, each gave $5,000 to the transition less than a year after Stephens plowed $1 million into a super PAC that opposed Trump. Paul Singer, another top GOP donor who declined to back Trump, gave $5,000 to the transition. Singer also gave a significant contribution to the inaugural committee, though the disclosure is not public yet, according to a source familiar with the donation.

Isaac Arnsdorf and Kenneth P. Vogel contributed to this report.