Recent Yemen Waiver Report Cited in Breyer’s Dissent

June 27, 2018, New York – In response to the Supreme Court’s ruling on Trump’s Muslim ban, the Center for Constitutional Rights issued the following statement:

Today's decision locates Trump's Muslim ban within a normal range of presidential discretion to control immigration. But this is not normal. The Muslim Ban is a historic act of discrimination, and a fully-enacted policy implementing Trump's consistent and bigoted expression of hatred toward Muslims. The Court's shameful acceptance of an immigration policy – that is separate and unequal – will stand not only as a naked betrayal of the principles of Freedom of Religion this country claims to embrace, but also as another of one of its historic judicial mistakes akin to Korematsu and Plessy v. Ferguson.

All of the versions of the Muslim Ban, including this latest iteration, have led to widespread injustices and rights violations of individuals lawfully entering or seeking to enter the United States. It also led to chaos – at airports, and later at consulates overseas, where peoples’ lives continue to be upended.

To this day, hundreds of family members of Yemeni-Americans are stranded in Djibouti after the U.S. Embassy closed in Sana’a and they were issued blanket denials of waivers they should have received based on their circumstances. As Justice Breyer stressed in his dissent, citing the report by the Center for Constitutional Rights and Yale Law School, the government’s apparent failure to offer any case-by-case consideration of waivers suggests the Ban is motivated by animus toward Muslims, and not a legitimate national security rationale. 

This Muslim Ban, like the brutal “zero tolerance” immigration policy at the Southern Border is one piece of this administration’s white nationalist, nativist agenda, that the People, and not only the courts, must resist.