Deborah E. Anker

Four Harvard faculty members joined in filing an amicus brief in a federal appeals court Sunday night to support another legal challenge to President Donald Trump’s immigration order. Over 200 law professors and clinicians signed the brief filed in the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals by Fatma Marouf, a Harvard Law School alumna and Director of the Immigration Law Clinic at Texas A&M; University School of Law...Harvard Immigration and Refugee Clinic Director Deborah E. Anker worked with Marouf— her former student—to draft the brief, and assistant director Sabrineh Ardalan helped compile signatures. Anker, Ardalan, Law School professor Bruce Hay, and School of Public Health professor Jacqueline Bhabha are all signatories. The law professors and clinicians argue that their “first-hand” experience working with clients makes their perspectives relevant to the case. The executive order “creates a serious risk of irreparable harm to our clients, students, and colleagues who have nonimmigrant (temporary) visas at United States universities,” they charge.

Donald Trump's suspension of refugee resettlement doesn't appear to affect the U.S. asylum system, negating any need for Canada to revisit how the two countries handle asylum claims at the border, the federal Immigration Department says...The orders call for increased detention and an expansion of the criteria for the expedited removal of undocumented immigrants. Critics say they also put undocumented immigrants at risk for criminal charges. "There is no way the U.S. is a safe third country of asylum," said Deborah Anker, the director of Harvard law school's immigration and refugee clinical program.

Sixteen Harvard Law School faculty members have joined thousands of other law professors across the country in signing a letter opposing Republican U.S. Senator Jeff Sessions’s nomination as United States Attorney General... Law School professor Ronald S. Sullivan Jr., who signed the letter, said Sessions’s record on voting rights, especially for minorities, is deeply troubling to him. “The aim of the letter is to raise the significant issues about voting, which is fundamental to our democratic experiment and, once these issues are raised, we hope that the committee and the citizenry in general would not support this nominee,” Sullivan said. “We certainly think that, party affiliation aside, no Attorney General should have taken such a radical view about voting rights laws.”