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Google employees have no legal right to protest the company’s choice of clients, the internet giant told a judge weighing the U.S. government’s allegations that its firings of activists violated the National Labor Relations Act.

“Even if Google had, for the sake of argument, terminated the employees for their protest activities — for protesting their choice of customers — this would not violate the Act,” Google’s attorney Al Latham said in his opening statement Tuesday at a labor board trial.

National Labor Relations Board prosecutors have accused the Alphabet Inc. unit of violating federal law by illegally firing five employees for their activism. Three of those workers’ claims had originally been dismissed under President Donald Trump, because agency prosecutors concluded that their opposition to the company collaborating with immigration enforcement wasn’t legally protected, according to their lawyer. But that decision was reversed after President Joe Biden fired and replaced the labor board’s general counsel.

Google has been roiled over the past four years by a wave of activism by employees challenging management over issues including treatment of sub-contracted staff, handling of sexual harassment, and a contract with the U.S. Customs and Border Protection agency, which some of the fired workers accessed internal information about and circulated a petition against.

Google has denied wrongdoing, saying in a Monday statement that it encourages “open discussion and debate” but terminated staff in response to violations of its data security policies. “Google terminated these employees not because of their protest as such, but because in the pursuit of their protest, they accessed highly confidential information that they had no right to access,” its attorney told the judge Tuesday.