The Electronic Intifada Podcast 3 February 2017
Immigration attorneys and immigrant rights groups continue to fight the Trump administration’s so-called Muslim ban but the executive branch of the US government remains intransigent in its refusal to comply with federal court orders against the ban.
The executive order banning persons from seven Muslim-majority countries from entering the US was signed by President Donald Trump last Friday.
On Saturday, thousands of activists poured into airports around the US to demand that Customs and Border Protection (CPB) release people it had detained under the ban. By the evening, a federal court in New York had issued an immediate order against the ban.
“What I saw at the protests at SFO [San Francisco International airport] was an organized and focused crowd of protesters … to respond and protest to the immediate implementation of Trump’s executive order,” said The Electronic Intifada’s Charlotte Silver in an interview for the podcast.
On Wednesday, immigration attorneys in Southern California told The Electronic Intifada that the US Marshals Service is failing to enforce federal court orders against the CPB at Los Angeles International airport, Silver reported.
There have been ”several” instances in the past few days where CBP agents “are telling lawyers, telling congress people, telling activists that they are specifically not complying with the court order, that it is not applying to them,” Silver explained.
She said that there are “serious reasons to be concerned about the Trump administration and its federal agency’s willingness to comply with court orders.”
Listen to the interview with Charlotte Silver via the media player above.
Theme music by Sharif Zakout
Featured audio: Lara Kiswani, Executive Director of the Arab Resource and Organizing Center, speaking to crowd at SFO, 28 January; crowd chanting and drumming via Palestinian Memes
Image: Protesters at O’Hare airport in Chicago, 28 January. (sarah-ji)
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