On this week’s Insider episode, Joyce Vance is joined by Cecillia Wang, National Legal Director of the ACLU, while Preet is out.
Cecillia discusses the many immigration cases the ACLU is currently litigating, including ones challenging President Trump’s birthright citizenship executive order, Trump’s invocation of the Alien Enemies Act to deport alleged Venezuelan gang members, and Trump’s revocation of temporary protected status for Venezuelan immigrants.
A NOTE FROM THE PRODUCER
is a lawyer and Supervising Producer at Stay Tuned with Preet.What work is the ACLU doing to defend immigrants’ due process rights?
ACLU National Legal Director Cecillia Wang joins Joyce Vance on a new episode of the Insider podcast, while Preet is out for his son’s college graduation. Wang speaks about what the ACLU is doing to challenge President Trump’s controversial immigration directives.
In the past few months, the ACLU has scored major legal victories, but some rulings have caused confusion and complicated the organization’s ability to defend its clients. For instance, SCOTUS recently rejected a class action lawsuit challenging Trump’s Alien Enemies Act executive order, now requiring detainees to bring separate challenges in district court in the jurisdiction where they are being held. Wang explains how this has caused chaos: “The courts have really created a morass where it's not only inefficient, but people’s core rights under the due process clause and other federal laws and provisions of the Constitution are really difficult to vindicate.”
Wang also discusses the unprecedented challenge facing courts: the growing inability to trust that the Trump administration is presenting arguments in good faith, which is an essential principle of the adversarial judicial system. According to Wang, courts “make[] assumptions about presidents acting in good faith, presidents seeing the writing on the wall when federal circuit courts tell them that their actions are illegal and deciding, okay, ‘I'm going to stop doing what the courts have deemed illegal.’ Here, we have a president who has no compunction about pushing beyond legal boundaries.”
How important is it for legal advocacy organizations like the ACLU to act as a check on our government? Let me know. Comment below.
Stay Informed,
Jake
