Battle over travel ban has lawyers ‘feeling the love’
Attorneys aiding immigrants earn tearful thanks, star treatment
Last week, Houston lawyer Monica Uddin grabbed an Uber to George Bush Intercontinental Airport, where she planned to help travelers from seven predominantly Muslim countries suddenly barred from entering the United States by the order of President Donald Trump.
Her driver was an Iranian immigrant, fearful that the executive order would prevent him from going to Iran — one of the countries on the list — to see his family. But when he realized where Uddin was going and why, Uddin recalled, he was so moved he began to cry.
“No one,” she said, “has ever burst into tears when I’ve said I’m a commercial litigator.”
After enduring decades of comparisons to sharks and pit bulls, lawyers recently have earned new respect as they have rushed by the hundreds to airports to represent those affected by the controversial ban. Crowds
at airports in New York and San Francisco chanted, “Let the lawyers in” during the first weekend of the ban.
The American Civil Liberties Union, which filed suit to overturn the travel ban, reported receiving $24 million in contributions during the week after Trump signed the order — seven times what the liberal advocacy group raised in all of 2015. The ACLU’s executive director, Anthony D. Romero, was greeted recently like a rock star on Trevor Noah’s “Daily Show.”
“Lawyers have been the butt of jokes for many years,” said Philip Hilder, a Houston white collar defense lawyer, “but I think people realize the stakes are high.”
The case could be headed to the Supreme Court after a threejudge panel of the 9th Circuit Court of Appeals upheld a lower court that halted the ban. The Trump administration has said it may appeal that ruling to the high court, while the president said Friday that he may issue a new executive order for a revised ban.
Touching everyday lives
Lawyers have long been reviled, particularly in conservative circles, as ambulance chasers gumming up the legal system, bleeding hearts getting criminals off on technicalities, and greedy shysters adding costs to everything from automobiles to health care by filing frivolous lawsuits — and taking one-third of whatever settlement they can get. But legal specialists say the controversy over the travel ban is showing people how lawyers can touch the lives of everyday people for the better, and the role they can play in a free society based on the rule of law.
Uddin, the daughter of Bangladeshi immigrants, said she knows all the lawyer jokes. One favorite: “What do you call 1,000 lawyers at the bottom of the ocean? A good start.”
She was among the first wave of lawyers to arrive at George Bush Intercontinental Airport during the first weekend of the travel ban. She pinned a sign to her shirt advertising free legal services in English and Arabic and roamed the international terminal.
Airport crew members dropped off food for her and the other lawyers, she said. Random travelers offered to buy coffee. One stranger came over with tears in her eyes recalling how her mother had marched in civil rights protests and how the volunteer lawyers restored her faith in fighting back.
“I have never seen anything like this,” Uddin said.
The Trump administration and its supporters have called the travel ban a matter of national security that seeks to protect the country from terrorism. They have called the move prudent, given terrorist attacks in both the United States and Europe over the past year, and portrayed the efforts by critics and their lawyers as obstructionist and dangerous.
But the ban has galvanized many lawyers who say the controversy has reminded them why they studied law in the first place. Attorneys who normally specialize in securities, real estate and complex litigation are flocking to classes to learn how to handle immigration cases.
At the University of Houston Law Center’s immigration clinic, for example, a hastily pulled together seminar on immigration law recently attracted 120 participants, said Geoffrey Hoffman, director of the clinic. Phone calls, emails and donations are pouring in to the ACLU of Texas, which has doubled its membership to 26,000 since the November elections, said executive director Terri Burke.
“We are feeling the love like we’ve never felt the love,” Burke said.
Sudden celebrities
About a week ago, Chris Hamilton, a Dallas trial lawyer, represented an Iraqi refugee detained at Dallas/Fort Worth International Airport for 15 hours. The refugee, who was a driver for the U.S. military in Iraq, was released less than an hour after Hamilton and other lawyers filed an emergency petition in federal court in Dallas.
Since winning that highprofile case, Hamilton said he has hardly been able to pay for a meal. Restaurant employees approach Hamilton with cellphones to take selfies with him.
Paul Wingo, a Dallas lawyer, recently had lunch with Hamilton in a downtown Dallas restaurant. The two had just tucked into a plate of chicken fingers, Wingo said, when one of the waitresses asked Hamilton if he was the lawyer from the airport she had seen on television.
The waitress, whose mother was an immigrant, called over a coworker, and before long, Wingo was snapping photos of them with Hamilton. And when it came time to pay the bill, Wingo recalled, the waitress told them that their money was no good there.
“I never had that happen before,” Wingo said.
Many lawyers said they were surprised by the shift, perhaps temporary, in public attitudes. Lawyers, after all, show up perennially on lists of the nation’s most hated professions, along with used car salesmen, politicians and journalists.
Houston publicist Mary Flood, who earned a law degree from Harvard Law School in 1993, stopped practicing 19 years ago. But the immigration ban has inspired her to reactivate her Texas law license. This week, she is taking a full-day class on immigration law and hopes to finish continuing legal education requirements that will allow her to practice again next month.
“I could tell something had changed,” Flood said. “What else could I do than just call my senator or give money to the ACLU?”