Former acting Attorney General Sally Yates told a “boldfaced lie” in her speech Tuesday night during the Democratic National Convention, contends a legal group with first-hand knowledge of her claim.
Yates’ claimed she was fired “for refusing to defend President Trump’s shameful and unlawful Muslim travel ban.”
But the ban, which targeted not Muslims but terrorism-fomenting nations, was upheld as constitutional by the U.S. Supreme Court, points out Jordan Sekulow, executive director of the American Center for Law and Justice, which defended the ban in court.
Sekulow said Yates “was fired for refusing to defend an order the Supreme Court found was constitutional.”
Her claim is “a boldfaced lie. There is no other way to put it,” he said.
“She refused to do her job and uphold the president’s lawful travel restrictions. That’s not me saying it; the Supreme Court upheld the president’s executive actions as lawful and not a ‘Muslim travel ban,'” Sekulow said.
The ACLJ was involved “at every stage of the lawsuits,” he said, filing three briefs at the Supreme Court after filing briefs in the Ninth and Fourth Circuits, and U.S. District Courts for Hawaii, Washington state and Maryland.
“We defended the lawfulness of the president’s travel restrictions at every step of the way. And we won. Sally Yates’s position lost, big-time,” he said.
Aiming “to defend the safety of all Americans,” the order barred entry to the United States from seven countries of concern, paused the U.S. refugee program and prioritized claims of people seeking refugee status due to religious persecution.
Sekulow said critics called it a “Muslim ban” to “whip up fervor in the media, even though nothing in the president’s order banned the entry of Muslims.”
The original countries listed in the ban were the known terrorist hotspots of Iran, Iraq, Syria, Sudan, Libya, Yemen and Somalia. He noted the ban went into effect when ISIS controlled large parts of Iraq and Syria and was expanding. Later, Iraq and Sudan were removed and Chad, North Korea and Venezuela were added.
Supporting the travel ban, Chief Justice Roberts argued in the majority opinion that under the Immigration and Nationality Act, “foreign nationals seeking entry into the United States undergo a vetting process to ensure that they satisfy the numerous requirements for admission.”
“The act also vests the president with authority to restrict the entry of aliens whenever he finds that their entry ‘would be detrimental to the interests of the United States,'” the chief justice pointed out.
“Relying on that delegation, the president concluded that it was necessary to impose entry restrictions on nationals of countries that do not share adequate information for an informed entry determination, or that otherwise present national security risks.”
