New York, NY, June 26, 2018 … The Anti-Defamation League (ADL) responded today to the 5-4 decision by the Supreme Court in Trump v. Hawaii, upholding President Trump’s discriminatory policy blocking immigrants and visitors to the United States from six Muslim-majority nations.
ADL CEO and National Director Jonathan Greenblatt issued the following statement:
Today’s decision will be recalled as a dark and shameful stain on America’s history reminiscent of other times when America turned against our highest ideals of equality, liberty, and justice. The President’s Muslim Ban is plainly discriminatory, inhumane, and un-American and betrays the President’s oath to uphold the Constitution.
We are profoundly disappointed and saddened that the Supreme Court allowed our country’s core values to be compromised in favor of religious discrimination and xenophobia. Today’s decision sanctioning discrimination has harrowing echoes of when the United States discriminated against Chinese immigrants, when the Supreme Court allowed our nation to incarcerate more than 100,000 American citizens and others of Japanese descent in the 1940s under the Korematsu decision, and when the United States turned away Jews fleeing the Nazis aboard the SS St. Louis. We stand with the Muslim community today and every day, and will never stop fighting for the values and ideals enshrined by our Constitution.
ADL fought the President’s Muslim Ban since its first iteration. Most recently, ADL filed an amicus brief along with a number of Jewish civil rights organizations urging the U.S. Supreme Court to uphold lower court rulings that blocked the President’s third attempt to prohibit travel to the United States from six majority-Muslim nations. The brief was prepared by the law firm Frankfurt Kurnit Klein & Selz, PC.