The first iteration of President Trump’s travel ban died a quiet death Thursday in a settlement brokered in part by Yale law students that will allow some banned travelers to reapply for visas.
The agreement “closes one chapter” in the fight between immigration advocates and the Trump administration, said David McGuire, executive director of the ACLU’s Connecticut chapter, but the battle now shifts to the U.S. Supreme Court, which will assess a revised version of the ban in October.
On Jan. 27, Trump signed an executive order curtailing immigration from seven predominantly Muslim countries. Travelers from those countries who came to the United States with previously valid papers were detained at airports and some were deported. An Iraqi man, Hameed Khalid Darweesh, who was detained at John F. Kennedy Airport in New York, became a rallying point for those who challenged the ban’s legitimacy.
Late that night, students from the Yale Law School Worker and Immigrant Rights Advocacy Clinic helped file a petition for a writ of habeas corpus, along with attorneys from the ACLU and immigrant advocacy groups. Darweesh was named as one of the plaintiffs.
The following day, a federal judge in Brooklyn ruled the government could not deport individuals being held in airports. The injunction allowed people with previously valid visas to enter the country but an attorney for the National Immigration Law Center said several hundred were deported before the injunction kicked in.
The judge’s ruling did not address the ban’s constitutionality and in March, the Trump administration unveiled a less restrictive version of the ban, which the U.S. Supreme Court will review next month.
In the settlement reached Thursday, the Department of Justice agreed to send letters to all those affected by the first ban with a list of free legal services to help reapply for visas. The agreement does not guarantee visas for those who were deported, but promises officials “will work in good faith” with applicants when reviewing their cases.
The agreement applies only to those detained at American airports, and did not award damages or cover the legal fees of the plaintiffs.
Clare Kane, a Yale law student who worked on the suit, called Thursday’s agreement “an extraordinary victory.”
“This settlement is a piece of a much larger story,” she said. “It’s not even the story of this lawsuit. It started with thousands of people showing up at airports around the country and speaking up for what’s right.”
Kane is part of a clinic within Yale Law School’s Jerome N. Frank Legal Services Organization, which pairs law students and their advisers with clients unable to afford private counsel.
The travel bans have drastically decreased the number of refugees entering Connecticut, said Chris George, executive director of Integrated Refugee & Immigrant Services, or IRIS, in New Haven.
“We probably had 200 people on our list, 200 cases that had passed the vetting process and were going to come this year, and are not because of the ban,” he said. “Because of the executive orders, we will drop from roughly 1,000 [refugees admitted] in 2016 to below 500 this year.”
Though groups representing the plaintiffs hailed Thursday’s settlement as a victory, they cautioned that the fight would continue – in the U.S. Supreme Court, and in courtrooms across the country.
“The pain and fear among immigrant and Muslim communities caused by the Trump administration’s unconstitutional ban continues,” said McGuire, the ACLU’s Connecticut director. “This first case may have ended, but the fight against this discriminatory ban is moving forward.”
For Kane, now a second-year student, the fight opened her eyes to the power of laws she is still learning to wield.
“When you’re at law school and a regime like this comes into power, you realize you have tools you can use to fight it,” she said. “It’s a victory for us.”
