President Donald Trump today provided the perfect lesson in how not to respond to tragedy.
Eight people were killed and nearly a dozen more injured yesterday when a man drove into the bike lane of a street in Lower Manhattan. Instead of expressing unity and resilience, Trump took to Twitter to further his nativist agenda, calling for entire Muslim and immigrant communities to be punished and for some of the worst national security policies of recent years to be revived. Specifically, Trump called for new “extreme vetting” procedures to keep Muslims out of the country, for an end to diversity-based immigration programs, and for the accused perpetrator of yesterday’s attack to be sent to Guantánamo.
We’ve gone down this irrational, knee-jerk path before — it never made us safer. In fact, some of our worst, most shameful moments in history occurred when we let fear get the better of us.
The “extreme vetting” that Trump wants to see more of refers to a host of policies intended to make it harder for certain people to immigrate to this country. Who those people are is no secret: Trump made that clear on his campaign trail when he called for a “total and complete shutdown on Muslims entering the United States until our country's representatives can figure out what is going on.” He later that because an explicit Muslim ban could offend sensitivities or the Constitution, the ban had “morphed” into nationality-based proposals and “extreme vetting.”
Indeed, the Trump administration has sought to leverage the failure of his consecutive Muslim bans to target Muslim immigrants in other ways. Already, we know that the visa application process has become more stringent for citizens of certain countries and the number of visas issues to individuals from Muslim-majority countries has , particularly those listed in iterations of the Muslim ban. (Though given the lack of transparency from the government, we don’t yet have a clear picture of how the administration’s approach has played out around the world.) We also know that social media surveillance of Muslim and other immigrants has stepped up. In addition to slashing the number of refugees the U.S. has agreed to receive, the government has also made the refugee admission process more restrictive and, most recently, placed a 90-day ban on refugees from almost entirely Muslim-majority countries, placing additional burdens on the most vulnerable people in the world.
Make no mistake — these policies use a national security pretext to bring the Trump administration closer to its goal of ending Muslim immigration to this country. An end to the visa diversity program, which would disproportionately affect Muslim and African communities, has exactly the same goal.
As for Trump’s call for Sayfullo Saipov, the accused attacker in New York, to be sent to Guantánamo — few symbols better illustrate the government’s worst impulses than the prison at Guantánamo Bay. Used to imprison Haitian refugees in the 1990s, and then fashioned after 9/11 as an “island outside the law” where prisoners could be tortured with impunity, Guantánamo now houses 41 men, most held without charge or trial. It is also home to a fundamentally broken military commissions system. Guantánamo was shown long ago to be an epic failure. The FBI and our federal court system are more than capable of dealing with terrorism cases.
Trump might take a cue from New York’s local leaders. Both Mayor Bill De Blasio and Gov. Andrew Cuomo have provided an for how to lead without compromising our values and the rule of law. The president could also learn something from the New Yorkers who celebrated Halloween last night as planned in a demonstration of resilience, or from those who will show up to interfaith vigil as an affirmation of the city’s values. Turning against each other or abandoning our principles throws away our greatest strengths and does nothing to make us safer. Excising entire groups from our immigrant communities, turning back the clock to return to an immigration system that explicitly and irrationally discriminates, and abandoning our Constitution does not make us safer.
History teaches that these fear-based attacks on immigrants inevitably bleed over into attacks on all our civil liberties—as U.S. citizens of Japanese ancestry can painfully attest. Such calls focus resources on fruitless measures and seek to exploit tragedy for a fundamentally racist agenda.
We must push past attempts to use fear to divide us. We must demand actions that focus on evidence-based preventive measures and individualized suspicion, rather than efforts to punish Muslims and immigrants as a whole.
Trump counts on violence like yesterday’s attack to distract Americans from our commitment to due process, the rule of law, and basic fairness. We can’t let him. It’s on us to make sure that we uphold the laws and values of our country. Destroying them doesn’t make us safer.
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Press ReleaseDec 2024
Free Speech
National Security
ACLU and Partners Urge Supreme Court to Block TikTok BanACLU and Partners Urge Supreme Court to Block TikTok Ban
WASHINGTON — Today, the American Civil Liberties Union, the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF), and the Knight First Amendment Institute at Columbia University filed an amicus brief urging the Supreme Court to block the enforcement of a law that would effectively ban people in America from using TikTok as soon as January 19, 2025. Earlier this month, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the D.C. Circuit rejected TikTok’s challenge to the law. TikTok has asked the Supreme Court for a temporary injunction to prevent the app from being banned while the court considers whether to take the case, saying that unless the justices intervene, the law will “shutter one of America’s most popular speech platforms the day before a presidential inauguration.” “The Constitution imposes an extraordinarily high bar on this kind of mass censorship,”said Patrick Toomey, deputy director of ACLU’s National Security Project. “The Supreme Court should take up this important case and protect the rights of millions of Americans to freely express themselves and engage with others around the world.” The brief argues that the D.C. Circuit failed to fully address the law’s profound implications for the First Amendment rights of the 170 million Americans who use TikTok. While the lower court’s decision correctly recognized that the statute triggers First Amendment scrutiny, it barely addressed users’ First Amendment interests in speaking, sharing, and receiving information on the platform. The court also perplexingly attempted to cast the government’s ban on TikTok as a vindication of users’ First Amendment rights, which it is not. The rights groups also explain that the law was intended to suppress certain content and viewpoints that many legislators believe could be amplified on TikTok, including the risk of foreign “propaganda.” But under the First Amendment, the government must meet a very high bar to restrict speech based on concerns about its “motivating ideology” or “perspective,” and the government has not come close to meeting that bar here. “The government should not be able to restrict speech, especially to the extent here, based on guessing about the mere possibility of uncertain future harm,” said David Greene, civil liberties director at EFF. “The Supreme Court should put the TikTok ban on hold while it considers the DC Circuit’s erroneous ruling.” Finally, the brief underscores that the government can’t impose this type of sweeping ban unless it’s necessary to prevent extremely serious and imminent harm to national security. But the government has not provided evidence of impending harm, or evidence that banning TikTok is the only available way to address its concerns. As the brief explains, the D.C. Circuit improperly treated the government’s invocation of “national security” as a trump card and failed to hold the government to its burden. “Restricting citizens’ access to foreign media is a practice that has long been associated with repressive regimes, and we should be very wary of letting the practice take root here,” said Jameel Jaffer, executive director at the Knight First Amendment Institute at Columbia University. “It would do lasting damage to the First Amendment and our democracy if the Supreme Court let this ban go into effect even temporarily.” You can find the brief online here: https://www.supremecourt.gov/DocketPDF/24/24A587/335380/20241217144322392_24A587%20TikTok%20v%20Garland%20Amicus%20Brief%20pdfa.pdf -
Press ReleaseDec 2024
National Security
Religious Liberty
ACLU Statement on New White House Strategy to Counter IslamophobiaACLU Statement on New White House Strategy to Counter Islamophobia
WASHINGTON – The Biden administration today released the first-ever national strategy to counter Islamophobia and related forms of bias and discrimination, including hate against Arab, Sikh, and South Asian Americans. In advance of the strategy, American Civil Liberties Union and its partners had urged the administration to overhaul government programs that reflect anti-Muslim discrimination. In particular, we have called for urgent action to constrain governmental agencies from continuing to exercise their authorities and technology to wrongly surveil and investigate, watchlist, and question and detain Muslims at the border, as well as deny immigration benefits to people from Muslim-majority countries. While the White House raised expectations that many of these issues would be addressed, the final strategy ended up falling far short. The following is a statement from Hina Shamsi, director of the ACLU’s National Security Project: “While this strategy acknowledges discrimination and its harms, it does little to end them and is a squandered opportunity. For decades, American officials have invoked national security to pass laws and implement programs that disproportionately harm Muslims and people perceived to be Muslim. A serious anti-discrimination strategy would concretely address multiple bias-infused government practices that deny our communities equal participation in civic life and our democracy, like federal watchlisting, surveillance, and investigation. We’re profoundly frustrated that the administration didn’t take even the basic, overdue step of recognizing that anti-Muslim discrimination is uniquely normalized and embedded in government policies.” -
VirginiaDec 2024
National Security
Trabelsi v. Crawford, et al. – Lawsuit Challenging Unlawful Detention and Inhumane Treatment of Acquitted ManTrabelsi v. Crawford, et al. – Lawsuit Challenging Unlawful Detention and Inhumane Treatment of Acquitted Man
Our client, Nizar Trabelsi, is in the United States against his will. The federal government brought him here from Belgium more than a decade ago and charged him with terrorism-related crimes. At trial, the government’s case failed: a federal jury found Mr. Trabelsi not guilty. But instead of allowing Mr. Trabelsi to return to Belgium after his acquittal, the United States placed him in highly restrictive immigration detention and began an ongoing effort to force him to Tunisia, where he was born and where he will very likely be tortured. Mr. Trabelsi’s detention violates the Constitution, immigration law, and the extradition treaty between the United States and Belgium. Through this lawsuit, he seeks to return to Belgium, and he demands an immediate improvement of his detention conditions. -
Press ReleaseDec 2024
National Security
Immigrants' Rights
Federal Judge Rejects Acquitted Man’s Argument That His Immigration Detention Is UnlawfulFederal Judge Rejects Acquitted Man’s Argument That His Immigration Detention Is Unlawful
ALEXANDRIA, Va. — This week, the U.S. District Court for the Eastern District of Virginia ruled that the court does not have jurisdiction to decide whether the government can continue to detain Nizar Trabelsi, a Tunisian national who was brought to the United States against his will for prosecution and was cleared of all charges last year. The ruling means the United States will be able to continue to detain Mr. Trabelsi while it attempts to deport him to Tunisia, where he was born and where, as an immigration judge ruled earlier this year, he will likely face torture. The court also concluded that even if it did have jurisdiction over Mr. Trabelsi’s case, his claims challenging the government’s detention of him would fail. “Reviewing claims that the government is holding someone unlawfully is at the core of the judicial function, and we’re heartbroken for our client that the court got this so wrong,” said Brett Max Kaufman, senior staff attorney with the ACLU’s Center for Democracy. “The government’s arguments in defense of Mr. Trabelsi’s detention makes a hash of the Constitution, immigration laws, and its own extradition treaty.” In 2013, the United States forcibly extradited Mr. Trabelsi from Belgium to face criminal charges in the United States. In July 2023, after almost 10 years of highly restrictive pretrial detention, a federal jury cleared Mr. Trabelsi of all charges. But instead of releasing Mr. Trabelsi or returning him to Belgium, the U.S. transferred him to immigration detention, wrongly treating him as an applicant for admission and placing him in the deportation process. Over the years, the Belgian government has issued multiple formal diplomatic requests asking the U.S. to facilitate his return, but the U.S. has refused to send him back. Mr. Trabelsi filed a lawsuit challenging the government's authority to detain him. He also sought immediate improvements to his detention conditions. Those claims were not part of the court’s ruling today, and will continue to be litigated on a separate track. “Mr. Trabelsi only wants to return to Belgium after being illegally extradited to the United States, held for ten years, and then acquitted by a jury of any crimes,” said Nicole Hallett, clinical professor of law and director of the Immigrants’ Rights Clinic at the University of Chicago Law School. “He cannot be held indefinitely and we will continue to fight to make sure that justice ultimately prevails.” Mr. Trabelsi is represented by the American Civil Liberties Union, the University of Chicago Law School’s Immigrants’ Rights Clinic, the ACLU of Virginia, and Professor Jonathan Hafetz of Seton Hall Law School. The complaint in Trabelsi v. Crawford was filed against Jeffrey Crawford, warden of the Farmville Detention Center where Mr. Trabelsi is being held; Liana Castano, ICE field office director for the Washington Field Office; Alejandro Mayorkas, secretary of the Department of Homeland Security; and Merrick Garland, U.S. attorney general.