Reuters reports: U.S. judges in at least five states blocked federal authorities from enforcing President Donald Trump’s executive order restricting immigration from seven Muslim-majority countries.
However, lawyers representing people covered by the order said some authorities were unwilling on Sunday to follow the judges’ rulings.
Judges in California, Massachusetts, Virginia and Washington state, each home to international airports, issued their rulings after a similar order was issued on Saturday night by U.S. District Judge Ann Donnelly in New York’s Brooklyn borough.
Donnelly had ruled in a lawsuit by two men from Iraq being held at John F. Kennedy International Airport.
While none of the rulings struck down Friday’s executive order by the new Republican president, the growing number of them could complicate the administration’s effort to enforce it.
The rulings add to questions about the constitutionality of the order, said Andrew Pincus, a Mayer Brown partner representing two Yemeni men who were denied U.S. entry from an overseas flight despite being legal permanent residents.
“People have gone through processes to obtain legal permanent resident status, or visas,” Pincus said. “There are serious questions about whether those rights, which were created by statute, can be unilaterally taken away without process.” [Continue reading…]
The Guardian reports: On Sunday afternoon, four Democratic members of the House of Representatives arrived at Dulles airport in Virginia on word that people had been detained and denied access to lawyers.
“We have a constitutional crisis today,” representative Don Beyer wrote on Twitter. “Four members of Congress asked CBP officials to enforce a federal court order and were turned away.”
Representative Jamie Raskin, also at the airport, tweeted that the federal agency had given “no answers yet” about whether agents were ignoring the courts. Raskin joined several other attorneys there, including Damon Silvers, special counsel at AFL-CIO, one of the groups trying to help visa holders.
“As far as I know no attorney has been allowed to see any arriving passenger subject to Trumps exec order at Dulles today,” Silvers tweeted on Sunday evening. “CBP appears to be saying people in their custody not ‘detained’ technically & Dulles international arrivals areas not in the United States.”
No one responded to calls or emails with questions about the court orders at Dulles CBP or the Department of Homeland Security (DHS), and the confusion played out in similar patterns at major airports around the country. [Continue reading…]
