Pressure from activists and employees who oppose the administration's immigration policies was mounting on Kalanick since Trump's controversial order to ban Muslims from seven countries from entering US.

In an email to his staff that was accessed by Reuters, Kalanick said, "Joining the group was not meant to be an endorsement of the President or his agenda but unfortunately it has been misinterpreted to be exactly that."

The company faced a massive outrage on social media with thousands of users deleting their Uber accounts and opting for rival Lyft.. To regain the customers, Uber has been emailing users who deleted their accounts saying that Uber shares their concerns and will compensate drivers affected by the ban.

"There are many ways we will continue to advocate for just change on immigration but staying on the council was going to get in the way of that. The executive order is hurting many people in communities all across America. Families are being separated, people are stranded overseas and there's a growing fear that the US is no longer a place that welcomes immigrants," Kalanick wrote in a note to employees.

CEOs of other companies are facing similar pressure from activists to quit the council and boycott the scheduled meeting with Trump on Friday. Other CEOs of companies scheduled to meet Trump on Friday include JPMorgan Chase & Co, Blackstone Group LP, IBM Corp and Wal-Mart Stores Inc, Tesla Inc CEO Elon Musk.

PepsiCo Inc CEO Indra Nooyi and Boston Consulting Group CEO Rich Lesser are also part of the council that has a strength of 15 members in total.

Technology companies including Microsoft, Google, Apple Inc and Amazon.com Inc have also opposed Trump's order and have come openly in support of the immigrants.

Inside Uber's headquarters as well, Trump's order seems to have led to dissent & discomfort. Thuan Pham, the company's chief technology officer who arrived in the US as a child refugee from Vietnam, wrote an e-mail to staff after Trump's election. Pham had compared Trump to former Chinese leader Mao Zedong and US President George W Bush "and his wars."

"For the next four years, I will not even utter the name of this deplorable person because I do not accept him as my leader. I will instead do everything I can to help defeat him and his destructive agenda over the next few years," Pham wrote in an e-mail first published by Business Insider.

Trying to address concerns of its employees, Uber CEO wrote an e mail to his employees saying, "Please know, your questions and stories on Tuesday, along with what I heard from drivers, have kept me resilient and reminded me of one of our most essential cultural values, Be Yourself."