News > Press Releases
Muslim ban: Still wrong no matter what the Supreme Court says
Posted on Jun 26 2018
June 26, 2018—Today’s Supreme Court decision allows Trump’s third version of his Muslim ban to go into full effect. This shameful ruling upholds bigotry and xenophobia, and betrays our country’s commitment to religious liberty and to safe haven for refugees.
Trump’s heartless ban separates families and today’s decision promises no end date to the separations. In Minnesota, home to the largest population of Somalis outside of Somalia, the vast majority of our Somali-Minnesota neighbors are impacted by this blanket ban and its continued separation of families who have endured years and even decades of desperation as loved ones wait and suffer in refugee camps. Of course it’s not only Somalis. Sharifa, a Yemeni national, had a visa to rejoin her U.S. citizen husband in the United States until the ban—then her visa was revoked. Now he is in the United States and she is stranded in Djibouti. Two of their four U.S. citizen children are with her, and two are in the United States. She is pregnant with a fifth child, who will be a U.S. citizen, born to a mother who is denied entry to this country.
This Muslim ban also refuses entry to desperate refugees who have undergone years of vetting, first by the United Nations and then by the United States and now have no hope of rejoining family members already here. These include refugees from brutal wars in Syria, Yemen and Somalia, who have no homes to return to.
Further, the decision is a failure of the Court to protect the independence of a judiciary increasingly disparaged, disrespected and attacked by Trump: from the racist remarks against Indiana-born U.S. District Judge Gonzalo Curiel, to the disparagement of courts the president disagrees with, to this week’s comments that immigrants should be deported without access to courts and due process. ILCM and many immigration lawyers also have grave concerns that the waiver process, the exception to the wholesale banning of citizens of the affected countries, does not work and does not reflect any meaningful process or protection. The dismal approval rates cited in the Sotomayor dissent are early proof that it is a failure.
“The Supreme Court decision is wrong,” said ILCM Executive Director John Keller, “just as it was wrong in Korematsu, upholding the internment of Japanese-Americans, and wrong in Dred Scott, upholding slavery. More than 70 years later, the Court today overturned Korematsu, acknowledging that was the wrong decision. We hope it does not take as long for the Court to recognize that today’s decision is equally wrong.”
As Justice Sonia Sotomayor wrote in her reasoned and eloquent dissent:
“Taking all the relevant evidence together, a reasonable observer would conclude that the Proclamation was driven primarily by anti-Muslim animus, rather than by the Government’s asserted national security justifications. …
“[D]espite several opportunities to do so, President Trump has never disavowed any of his prior statements about Islam. Instead, he has continued to make remarks that a reasonable observer would view as an unrelenting attack on the Muslim religion and its followers. …
“By blindly accepting the Government’s misguided invitation to sanction a discriminatory policy motivated by animosity toward a disfavored group, all in the name of a superficial claim of national security, the Court redeploys the same dangerous logic underlying Korematsu [the Japanese internment decision] and merely replaces one “gravely wrong” decision with another.”
Today’s 5-4 Supreme Court ruling in Hawaii vs. Trump is wrong. It refuses to acknowledge racist and xenophobic intentions stated over and over again for the last two years. ILCM will continue to defend the value of true due process, equality under the law, and the importance of immigrant and refugee families to Minnesota and the United States.