Trump fires acting AG over ban defiance – Move reflects mounting conflict

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WASHINGTON, Jan 31, (Agencies): In an extraordinary public showdown, President Donald Trump fired the acting attorney general of the United States after she publicly questioned the constitutionality of his refugee and immigration ban and refused to defend it in court.

The clash Monday night between Trump and Sally Yates, a career prosecutor and Democratic appointee, laid bare the growing discord and dissent surrounding an executive order that halted the entire US refugee program and banned all entries from seven Muslim-majority nations for 90 days. The firing, in a written statement released just hours after Yates went public with her concerns, also served as a warning to other administration officials that Trump is prepared to terminate those who refuse to carry out his orders.

Yates’ refusal to defend the executive order was largely symbolic given that Sen. Jeff Sessions, Trump’s pick for attorney general, will almost certainly defend the policy once he’s sworn in. He’s expected to be confirmed Tuesday by the Senate Judiciary Committee and could be approved within days by the full Senate. Yet the firing reflected the mounting conflict over the executive order, as administration officials have moved to distance themselves from the policy and even some of Trump’s top advisers have made clear that they were not consulted on its implementation.

Challenges
As protests erupted at airports across the globe, and as legal challenges piled up in courthouses, Yates directed agency attorneys not to defend the executive order. She said in a memo Monday she was not convinced it was lawful or consistent with the agency’s obligation “to stand for what is right.” Trump’s press secretary, Sean Spicer, soon followed with a statement accusing Yates of having “betrayed the Department of Justice by refusing to enforce a legal order designed to protect the citizens of the United States.” Trump named longtime federal prosecutor Dana Boente, the US attorney for the Eastern District of Virginia, as Yates’ replacement.

Boente was sworn in privately late Monday, the White House said, and rescinded Yates’s directive. Also late Monday, the acting head of Immigration and Customs Enforcement was removed. The administration didn’t offer any explanation for the move, only said via Twitter that Daniel Ragsdale is returning to his previous position as deputy director. ICE executive associate director Thomas Homan was elevated to the role of acting chief.

Homeland Security Secretary John Kelly said in a statement that Homan had led efforts “to identify, arrest, detain, and remove illegal aliens.” The statement didn’t mention Ragsdale. The chain of events bore echoes of the Nixon-era “Saturday Night Massacre,” when the attorney general and deputy attorney general resigned rather than follow an order to fire a special prosecutor investigating the Watergate scandal.

The prosecutor, Archibald Cox, was fired by the solicitor general. Yates, a holdover from the Obama administration who was the top federal prosecutor in Atlanta and later became Loretta Lynch’s deputy, was not alone in her misgivings about the policy and its rollout.

Meanwhile, US Muslim leaders filed suit against President Donald Trump Monday over an immigration order that they said was a “fear-mongering” attempt at keeping members of their religion out of the country.

Nihad Awad, executive director of the Council on American-Islamic Relations, joined 26 others as plaintiffs in the lawsuit alleging that Trump’s temporary ban on immigrants from seven Muslim-majority countries was in fact a “Muslim exclusion order” that violates the US constitution’s religious freedom protections. “Donald Trump’s executive order is not based on national security, it is based on fear-mongering,” Awad said Monday. “This is not a Muslim ban, it is a Muslim exclusion order.” Besides excluding Muslim refugees and immigrants from abroad, the suit alleges Trump’s executive order will force out US-resident Muslims from those seven countries “by denying them the ability to renew their lawful status or receive immigration benefits … based solely on their religious beliefs.” That will lead to “the mass expulsion” of both immigrant and nonimmigrant Muslims, the suit, filed in the district court in Alexandria, Virginia, alleged. Plaintiffs in the lawsuit include several CAIR officials, among them prominent Muslim-American lawyers and activists.

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