In this issue:

In court today challenging Trump's asylum ban 

We will be in court today along with the ACLU and Southern Poverty Law Center on our emergency challenge to Donald Trump's Asylum Ban, which prohibits anyone who crosses the southern border without inspection from obtaining asylum. As we told you last week, immediately after the ban was issued, the Center for Constitutional Rights joined our co-counsel to challenge it on behalf of community partners East Bay Sanctuary Covenant, Al Otro Lado, Innovation Law Lab and Central American Resource Center in Los Angeles. Things have moved quickly since then. The government filed its opposition last Thursday, and we filed our response on Friday. Today, we are in court in San Francisco, urging a federal judge to block the ban as unlawful and unconstitutional. The ban, in the form of a regulation that skipped the required period of public comment, violates law that explicitly requires the government to process any request for asylum "whether or not at a designated port of arrival" and represents another outrageous attempted power grab by Donald Trump. Moreover, as we have shown in a separate lawsuit, asylum seekers are being turned away even at ports of entry. The real motivations for the Asylum Ban are similar to the Muslim Ban: xenophobia and white supremacy. Check back at ccrjustice.org, and on Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram, for updates on today’s hearing.

Gitmo prisoner's case to be reviewed tomorrow 

Tomorrow, our client, Guantánamo prisoner Guled Hassan Duran, will have his case heard before a Periodic Review Board that will determine whether to clear him for release or transfer. Mr. Duran was captured in 2004 while traveling to Sudan for surgery after being seriously injured by gunfire in a fight with gang members trying to steal his motorcycle. He was held in secret detention by the CIA, and flown to several locations before arriving in Guantánamo almost two years later. Throughout his captivity, the CIA withheld medical attention for his gunshot wound in an effort to coerce him to cooperate, including acting as a spy. Mr. Duran is among a group of prisoners who are not cleared for release, but whom the government has also said it will not charge—essentially claiming authority to detain him for the rest of his life. We have urged the PRB to clear him for release, to end more than a decade of legal limbo. Meanwhile, we continue to directly challenge the legality of Mr. Duran's detention in federal court, arguing that his capture and detention were never legal under the Authorization for the Use of Military Force, and that, whatever the initial justification for detaining him, it has long since expired.