Its ACLU 1, Trump 0and Theyre Just Getting Started
Fighting Time
It’s ACLU 1, Trump 0—and They’re Just Getting Started
That $20 million the ACLU raised in a weekend after it beat Trump in court was great, but it also raised the stakes: Can the storied group continue to deliver?
Chris Smith
02.10.17 1:03 AM ET
Lee Gelernt looked both thrilled and disoriented. The American Civil Liberties Union lawyer, normally a household name only in his own household, had emerged from a federal courthouse in Brooklyn to find 2,000 protestors cheering him.
The 54-year-old Gelernt and his colleagues had just won an emergency Saturday night stay of President Donald Trump’s executive order banning most travelers from seven majority-Muslim countries. And while the civil liberties lawyer in the nondescript gray suit and the proudly-nerdy black-framed glasses was ecstatic over the victory, Gelernt was exhausted by the work that had gone into it.
“We knew there was gonna be this Muslim ban, and we started gearing up after Trump was elected, but we thought we would be challenging the ban for people stopped at airports overseas,” he said, standing in a park near the Brooklyn Bridge as colleagues tried to find a bar in which to celebrate. “Trump signed the order at about 4:45 Friday afternoon. We didn’t expect that people en route to the U.S. when he signed the order would be detained. I start getting emails around 10 o’clock from the International Refugee Assistance Project saying there may be trouble at JFK with two of their clients who are Iraqi nationals. So people worked all night and we filed a complaint at 5:53 a.m. Saturday. Then at noon we started writing emergency stay papers to try to prevent people from being deported before the judge could rule on the legality of Trump’s order.”
The haste and sloppiness of Trump’s decree handed the ACLU a short-term legal and political gift. Had the executive order been written more coherently, and rolled out with greater coordination, it wouldn’t have provided the potent symbolism of women, children, and people who’d risked their lives to help the U.S. military being locked up—and it wouldn’t have provoked thousands of demonstrators to clog American airports or goaded judges to act quickly to stop it. “But we’re not kidding ourselves,” said Omar Jadwat, who had been in the courtroom as Gelernt’s ACLU co-counsel. “It’s just the beginning. Immigration and litigation—that’s the American way.”
Indeed. And now that a three-judge panel of the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals in San Francisco has upheld the lower court decisions that stalled Trump’s travel ban, the legal action and the spotlight will shift to Washington and the Supreme Court. Yet the ACLU’s initial scramble to redirect its counterattack is an important preview of the larger challenge the organization faces. Can it stay nimble for the next four years?
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Gelernt points out that the Justice Department will always have more lawyers, even after the ACLU goes on a hiring spree. (His younger sister is currently battling the government in a very different arena: Michelle Gelernt, a federal public defender, is representing Joaquín “El Chapo” Guzmán.) “But to the extent we can even it out a little bit, that’s why all these private law firms volunteering help, all these law students staying up all night, are important,” he says. “And we are now looking at one of those classic civil rights movements, where it’s not just the lawyers in court making technical arguments. It’s the combination of legal work and an enormous outpouring of the community. That support is essential, if any real civil rights work is going to be successful.”
There’s encouraging news on that front as well: The ACLU membership rolls have doubled, to 1 million, which could translate into more political muscle. “That gives us a tremendous opportunity, in terms of activating those members, directing them to take action,” Cole says.
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http://www.thedailybeast.com/articles/2017/02/10/it-s-aclu-1-trump-0-and-they-re-just-getting-started.html
