On February 15, ACLU lawyer Lee Gelernt, who argued the first case against President Trump’s Muslim ban, was live to answer your questions about immigrants' rights under the Trump administration.
Partial Transcript:
LEE GELERNT, ACLU ATTORNEY: Hi. I’m Lee Gelernt, at the ACLU. I am the deputy director of the ACLU’s national immigrant rights project, and director of the project’s access to the courts program. I also teach at Columbia Law School, and I have been litigating the issues around the muslim ban and argued the first case -- the first challenge that was brought where we received a nationwide injunction that first weekend. I am continuing to litigate that case, I’m involved in many other cases around the country. I am also monitoring and responding to a lot of the raids we have seen recently. So I was hoping just to let people know where things stand, and answer some questions if people have them.
Right now, the ACLU is involved in more than 10 challenges to the Muslim ban throughout the country. The first one we brought, as I said, was the case in New York, and that’s the Darweesh case. We are filing briefs at midnight tomorrow night, and we will be in court on the 21st, next week on Tuesday, for a hearing on the merits. The government is trying to throw out our case, saying we have no viable challenge to the executive order. Needless to say, we strongly disagree. We believe the executive order violates the equal protection and free religion causes of the first amendment, because it disfavors muslims, it favors christians and in general is arbitrarily distinguishing between majority and minority religions. It also denies due process, it violates people's rights to apply for asylum, and notably, every court that has looked at this issue since our first victory that first weekend has ruled against the government. And so we are seeing courts coming out with a stinging rejection of the executive order.
And what we are hearing in response to those court ruling is that the government may no longer fight to keep that executive order, but may in fact change the executive order, and so we are hearing that potentially as early as tomorrow, maybe even today, we’ll see a new executive order. Now if that new executive order makes only minor changes, minor tweaks, we will obviously continue to fight that because we think that the stain of religious discrimination will not disappear simply by a few changes in the order, but if the Trump administration completely abandons the idea of a ban on certain countries and certain religions and just goes back to a regular vetting process like we had under the Obama administration then we’ll take a serious look at that and maybe some of the problems will have been solved. But until we see a definitive ruling from the Supreme Court or a complete abandonment by the Trump administration, we will be continuing to challenge these cases in court.
On the raids front, we are seeing a lot of activity, as you all have probably seen, over the weekend, there were hundreds and hundreds of arrests, and contrary to what the administration is saying, these are not just serious criminals. We are seeing people without even any criminal conviction being arrested in these raids, and we are seeing an ICE presence (Immigration and Customs Enforcement presence) in these communities and it is far more widespread than under the Obama administration, so any attempt to say they’re just doing what the Obama administration was doing is wrong. We are seeing ICE people out in the communities and it’s terrorizing communities, it’s making kids, older people, everyone, scared to be out and about. In fact, in Seattle over the weekend, we had an arrest of someone who had lawful status under DACA, and they were arrested.
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