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New York, NY, April 3, 2018 … The Anti-Defamation League (ADL), along with a number of Jewish civil rights organizations, last Friday filed an amicus brief with the U.S. Supreme Court urging the Court to uphold lower court rulings that have blocked President Trump’s third attempt to prohibit travel to the United States from six majority-Muslim nations. The 9th Circuit Court of Appeals largely affirmed the injunction put in place, which now protects foreign nationals with a bona fide relationship with a person or entity in the United States.
“As the Jewish community celebrates Passover this week, we are reminded of the experience of being exiled and becoming strangers in a strange land,” ADL CEO Jonathan Greenblatt said. “And, more recently, we recall how the United States turned away Jews aboard the St. Louis who were fleeing the Nazi Holocaust during World War II, or when the United States passed laws that excluded and discriminated against the Chinese, or when our nation rounded up more than 100,000 Japanese Americans and interned them in prison camps in the 1940s. In each of these instances, America let prejudice and fear predominate in closing its doors and allowing its core values to be compromised, only to realize too late why those actions were wrong.”
John B. Harris, ADL Legal Affairs Committee Chair and primary author of the brief added, “Virtually every court that has reviewed iterations of the President’s travel ban has found it be discriminatory and ill-advised. The Supreme Court has the opportunity to ensure that our nation stands as a beacon of hope for those seeking a better life, free from persecution and extreme violence, consistent with our Constitution and our core values.”
ADL’s brief traces America’s history as a nation dedicated to ideals of equality, liberty and justice, and warns against repeating the shameful times in our past when America has turned against those ideals. The brief also argues that even worse, the Government now tries to justify its travel ban on immigration laws that were enacted for the purpose of reinforcing our nation’s commitment to immigrants and of correcting the historic harm discriminatory quotas caused our nation.
The Jewish Council for Public Affairs, the Union for Reform Judaism, the Central Conference of American Rabbis, Women of Reform Judaism, and T’ruah all joined the brief. The law firm Frankfurt Kurnit Klein & Selz, PC prepared the brief on behalf of ADL.