Stamps out dissent
firing over it — capped a day in which resistance to the ban fomented inside the Government and across the country.
Civil rights lawyers and others across the country increased the pressure on Trump to dial back the ban — filing legal challenges to the executive order as they worked to determine whether people were still being improperly denied entry or detained.
Lee Gelernt, deputy director of the American Civil Liberties Union’s Immigrants’ Rights Project, who worked on one of the legal challenges, said of Yates’ memo: “It sends a very strong message that there’s something very wrong with the Muslim ban.”
Democrats criticised Yates’ firing as an unfair termination of someone who was following the law. House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi said: “What the Trump Administration calls betrayal is an American with the courage to say that the law and the Constitution come first.”
Senate Minority Leader Charles Schumer said the termination “underscores how important it is to have an attorney general who will stand up to the White House when they are violating the law”, and said many have doubts about Sessions.
Others, though, turned their ire on Yates.
George J. Terwilliger III, a Deputy Attorney General in the George H W Bush Administration, said Yates’s memo was a “foolish, naked political move by what appears to be an ambitious holdover official” that would only create “unnecessary disorder”.
Even with Yates gone, there remain serious questions about the implementation of the order.
A lawsuit in Virginia asserted that dozens of people may have been forced to give up their green cards by Customs and Border Protection agents, although that figure could not immediately be substantiated.
Lawyers in Los Angeles said they had received similar reports, though they were still exploring them.
The ACLU’s Gelernt said that lawyers were “having trouble independently verifying anything because the Government will not provide full access to all the detainees”.
Of particular concern, he said, was that the Government had not turned over a list of detainees, as it had been ordered to do by a federal judge in New York.
He said that lawyers might be back in federal court in the next day or so to forcibly get access to it.
The ACLU lawsuit in New York is perhaps the most significant of a growing number of legal challenges.
The Council on American-Islamic Relations also filed a sweeping challenge yesterday, alleging that the order is meant “to initiate the mass expulsion of immigrant and nonimmigrant Muslims lawfully residing in the United States”.
The lawsuit lists 27 plaintiffs, many of them lawful permanent residents and refugees who allege that Trump’s order will deny them citizenship or prevent them from travelling abroad and returning home. Lawyers with the Northwest Immigrant Rights Project filed a similar challenge in Washington state.
Bob Ferguson, Washington state’s Attorney General, also filed a lawsuit yesterday alleging broad, constitutional concerns with the order and its impact on Washington — making him the first state official to do so. That lawsuit has the support of Microsoft and Amazon.com, two companies based in Washington state.
White House press secretary Sean Spicer said that one lawsuit “doesn’t make any sense” and sought to minimise the action as simply subjecting 109 people to more rigorous screening. According to State Department statistics, about 90,000 people received nonimmigrant or immigrant visas in fiscal year 2015 from the seven countries affected by Trump’s executive order.