(Google Image)

Google honored civil rights advocate Fred Korematsu with the Google Doodle on Monday, following a weekend of protests over President Trump’s executive order limiting immigration into the United States.

The move comes as tech companies protest Trump’s controversial order, which civil rights groups have widely condemned as unconstitutional.

When President Franklin D. Roosevelt issued an executive order forcing U.S. citizens of Japanese descent into internment camps, Kotematsu refused to go and was arrested. Backed by the director of the American Civil Liberties Union, Kotematsu took his case to court.

The Supreme Court ruled 6-3 to convict Kotematsu, who was placed in a Utah internment camp. Eventually, in 1983, a federal judge in San Francisco overturned the ruling. He continued to advocate for civil rights later in life, and was awarded the Presidential Medal of Honor in 1998.

Monday’s Google Doodle marks what would have been Korematsu’s 98th birthday and comes after days President Trump signed an executive order banning citizens from seven majority-Muslim countries from entering the United States. In an internal memo seen by Bloomberg, Google CEO Sundar Pichai, himself an immigrant, criticized the ban.

“It’s painful to see the personal cost of this executive order on our colleagues,” Pichai wrote in the memo obtained by Bloomberg News. “We’ve always made our view on immigration issues known publicly and will continue to do so.”

In Google’s description of Korematsu, the company quotes the activist’s famous saying, “If you have the feeling that something is wrong, don’t be afraid to speak up.”

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