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Hi Friend,
After a summer of difficult Supreme Court rulings, I’m thrilled to bring you some good civil rights news for a change!
Muslim Advocates has been in the fight against the Muslim Ban from day one and as part of that effort, we sued the Trump administration on behalf of people who were wrongfully denied visa waivers and were prevented from coming to the U.S. to see their families.
On Monday, after years of court battles, a federal judge ruled against the government and in favor of our clients! Now, by court order, the government has to work with us to create a process allowing these Muslim Ban victims to continue their visa applications without having to spend years and potentially thousands of dollars starting from scratch.
You can read the judge’s ruling here. [[link removed]]
But let’s step back a bit so you can appreciate the full story. In 2018, the U.S. Supreme Court shamefully upheld Trump’s Muslim Ban. One of their justifications for this ruling was that a waiver process existed that was supposed to allow people targeted by the Muslim Ban to receive a visa and come to the U.S. if they could show “undue hardship if barred from traveling,” if their travel was “in the national interest” and that allowing their travel would not be adverse to U.S. national interests.
Thousands applied for these waivers but almost none of them were granted at the time. We knew something was wrong so we teamed up with Lofti Legal LLC, Mayer Brown and Perkins Coie LLP to file Emami v. Nielsen (later renamed Emami v. Blinken ), a lawsuit against the federal government on behalf of a group of Muslim Ban victims who were denied waivers. This lawsuit was one of the first major legal challenges to the Muslim Ban after it was upheld by the Supreme Court. Eventually, our lawsuit was consolidated with another similar case, Pars Equality Center v. Blinken .
The court battles dragged on for years and when President Joe Biden took office and rescinded the Muslim Ban, we were shocked when his administration argued that our lawsuit should be dismissed without any relief for our clients. If our lawsuit were simply dismissed, our clients — and potentially tens of thousands of other Muslim Ban victims who were wrongfully denied visa waivers by Trump — would have had to restart their visa application process from scratch. For many, this would have meant AGAIN spending thousands on lawyers, AGAIN wading through heaps of paperwork and even traveling to a foreign consulate to redo their visa interview!
On behalf of our clients, we fought back against the Biden administration and argued that real justice would mean that they, and everyone else who was wrongfully denied a visa waiver, should not have to redo this onerous application process. On Monday, a federal judge ruled once and for all that the Emami victims did not have “the opportunity to apply under a properly-administered waiver process” and if forced to start all over now “they will bear undue transactional costs, financial and otherwise, that they should not be required to bear for a second time.”
In other words: these folks never got a fair process the first time and shouldn’t have to start from the beginning a second time. We couldn’t agree more!
Of course, our work is far from over. The judge also ruled that the government has to meet with us to work out a process ensuring that all people affected by Trump’s unjust waiver denials can have their visa applications fairly reconsidered without having to start over again.
So our work continues. Not only have we been tasked with working with the government to establish a fair visa reapplication process for our clients, but we’re also fighting to make sure that process is open to the potentially tens of thousands of Muslim Ban victims who were also wrongfully denied visas. AND we’re still fighting to ensure that Congress passes the NO BAN Act to prevent future presidents from enacting another Muslim Ban. ( Add your voice to our campaign! [[link removed]] )
All of this long, difficult, necessary work is possible because of your support so thank you genuinely. This is very much your victory too.
In solidarity,
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Chris Godshall-Bennett
Muslim Advocates Legal Fellow
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Washington, DC 20043 United States
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