A list of lawyers to fight Trump's immigration ban?

February 2, 2017 12:35 PM

We are a group of 4 coders in Vancouver, and we've been as shocked as everyone else re Trump's immigration ban. We decided we'd try to put together a list of lawyers for affected travellers / other interested parties to use when stuck.

Our list is here:
Coders Without Borders - US legal representation for affected travellers

I'm just wondering if the MeFi community might know some other similar groups beyond the people & orgs we've already contacted:

I also wanted to thank oryelle and respondents' help for their question and answers re volunteering Arabic translations for travellers stuck at Dulles.

I've already contacted Lawyers For Good Government as a result of seeing that Ask (they have an excellent list here), and similarly I wrote to Joanna Rothkopf at Jezebel after seeing her post at the weekend listing legal and therapist resources here.

If anyone could point me in the direction of others doing similar kinds of things I'd be really grateful.

The list is not long at present, but we will be adding resources every day. We compiled these first entries from the US Department of Justice's list of pro bono legal providers.

posted by northtwilight to Law & Government (6 answers total)

Best answer: What's your goal here? That is, who do you expect to be the audience for this list? In general, the way it's been working is that people who know in advance they need legal services have been contacting the ACLU, who have been farming out the cases depending on the client's needs and the geographic location. For folks who get stuck at airports, there have been lawyers there almost around the clock at most US airports with international arrivals from affected countries since Friday night, and my understanding is that that will be the case for as long as it's needed.

I'm not familiar with all of the folks on the DOJ list you pointed to. Some of the ones I do recognize are very good. Some I know for a fact are not taking these cases. Also, DOJ is the agency that will be defending the ban in court, so while I'm not saying the list is bad, I am saying use caution when taking recommendations from them.

(IAAL, IANYL, TINLA)
posted by decathecting at 1:22 PM on February 2, 2017 [1 favorite]

Best answer: Some of the organizations doing direct legal support at airports include Asian Law Caucus, CAIR california, and CUNY CLEAR
posted by latkes at 1:53 PM on February 2, 2017 [1 favorite]

Best answer: One Justice is one of the coordinators for SFO. Their lawyers are on site at the airport.
posted by ClaudiaCenter at 6:11 PM on February 2, 2017 [2 favorites]

Response by poster: Thanks everyone, much appreciated.

We're just trying to assemble a resource for people to use, if they or their relatives are stuck at US airports trying to get help. Basically we're hoping that people can look up their location, find an attorney's number, and call up right away.

We met up tonight and got to talking with another lawyer here in Vancouver who handles Canadian immigration matters, to ask if he could think of any angles we'd been missing. He suggested we look at NAFTA alternatives - ie if a would-be migrant gets shunted to Canada instead of the US on attempted entry - but for the most part we might be OK for now.

decathecting, would you be able to PM me with those firms not participating that you know of? Going forward we will try to contact lawyers directly to confirm their willingness; we were just trying to get something up quickly in the interim. Obviously we want to clean the list of inaccurate info where we can.

Latkes and ClaudiaCenter, thank you for your suggestions; I think I already have ALC and CAIR CA in the short list I have at the moment but I wasn't aware of One Justice before.

Cheers
Massimo
posted by northtwilight at 12:09 AM on February 3, 2017

Best answer: Also see NILC.
posted by professor plum with a rope at 1:01 AM on February 3, 2017 [1 favorite]

Response by poster: Fantastic, professor plum, thank you!
posted by northtwilight at 11:15 AM on February 3, 2017