 Hi, everyone. My name is Noor Zafra and I'm an attorney with the ACLU. Part of my work at the ACLU is I work in the National Security Project and in that project what we do is challenge abusive government policies in the national security space, challenge abusive immigration and criminal law policies as well. I want to thank Simon and ArtsLink for putting together this program and for inviting me to give a short presentation. So what I want to do in my talk is build upon this concept of solidarity, but I want to look at it from a slightly different angle. You know, because in my work what we see a lot is that different government policies that are discriminatory and abusive actions by the state are often interconnected and we see this repeatedly, right? A policy can be enacted as a national security measure, but it ends up having negative impacts and discriminatory impacts on certain groups of immigrants. So that highlights for me the fact that it's all the more important for our resistance to these policies to be similarly collaborative and intersectional because these policies themselves are interconnected. And therefore the resistance to them must take into account the intersectional nature of these policies. And I want to use the example of the Muslim ban to further highlight and elucidate this point. So when the Muslim ban was enacted, the underlying or the primary rationale for the ban was the Muslim administration basically said that the president has unchecked power as an executive to exclude anyone he wants based on, for national security reasons, right? That was the underpinning rationale of the ban is that the executive, he has been given this power to unilaterally decide who can and cannot come into this country and if the president unilaterally decides that a group of people pose some sort of national security threat that he has the power to exclude them. This rationale was upheld and endorsed when the Supreme Court allowed the ban to stay in place. So in doing so, you know, if you read through the court's opinion, a big part of the argument that the plaintiffs made was that you have to look at the president's statements, that his deputies and other people in the administration made. And if you do that, it's fairly clear that this policy is not based on national security, but that this policy is a xenophobic, Islamophobic, racist policy that pretty much enacts the xenophobia that Trump kind of rode on during his campaign and into his presidential tenure. The court ignored all that, saying that's irrelevant. And instead basically agreed with the Trump administration in saying that the president does have unlimited power and if he says national security, then that means that national security is actually what's at issue and that can be used to exclude groups of people and that can be used to enact a discriminatory immigration policy. So now fast-forwarding to a couple months later. I'm sure many of you read about this last week, the president enacted an asylum ban that essentially prevents people, individuals migrating from Central American countries from receiving asylum. And it's interesting because if you look at, so this ban was also enacted via a presidential proclamation, unilateral executive order, and if you look at the text of this proclamation, it relies on the very same authority that underpinned the Muslim ban. Namely, that the president has unchecked executive power and that if he says a group of people pose a national security threat, that those individuals can be excluded because he has the power to do that. So, I mean, what this connection between the Muslim ban and this new asylum ban shows is that policies and rationales and reasonings that are used in one realm to exclude one group of people, if those are sanctioned by the courts, which, you know, which the Muslim ban was, they will very quickly and can very easily be used to target a completely different group of people under a very similar rationale. And, you know, we know, and anyone who kind of, you know, looks at President Trump's comments and takes them at face value knows that both the Muslim ban and all the rhetoric preceding it and this, you know, asylum ban and the rhetoric preceding it is grounded in racism and it's grounded in xenophobia. But the court, but the Supreme Court, when it refused to look at all that, essentially sanctioned the use of national security as a sort of pretext to allow the president to allow the executive to discriminate. So, that just shows some interesting connections between, you know, a policy that was designed to exclude Muslims and then a policy that is designed to exclude Latino refugees and migrants. And the parallels don't stop there. I think they go a little bit further. So, this, you know, I spoke about how kind of in the domestic realm and the realm of domestic policy, domestic law, there's these interconnections between national security and immigration. That extends to the global space as well because if you, you know, in both Central American countries from where these migrants are coming and in the Middle Eastern countries or primarily Middle Eastern countries from which Muslims have been excluded, the U.S. has a pretty long history of imperialism and war-making and military intervention, right? And it's not a coincidence that the U.S. has been involved in very negative ways in both parts of these worlds and created the conditions from which people are fleeing and then when those people are trying to flee those conditions and seek refuge in this country, we're turning around and excluding them. So, you know, an example, in Guatemala, the U.S. and this is, this is like, you know, a history that throughout the 80s repeated itself in various Central American countries. In Guatemala, in El Salvador, in Honduras, in Nicaragua, in all these countries, the U.S. supported right-wing regimes that were brutally oppressive towards their people and it supported military coups that created, you know, decades of violence which is, or the effects of which we're seeing to this day and the effects of which are precisely what people are fleeing from. So, the U.S. is not, you know, some kind of innocent bystander when it comes to people all of a sudden showing up at its borders. Like there's a history and a global history to this that we have to recognize and I think in order to have policies, immigration policies that are moral, that are compassionate, we really have to understand history in a way that I think oftentimes in this country we try to ignore. We have a very short-sighted view of. Similarly, in the Middle East, the same story repeats itself, maybe on a little bit more of a recent timeline. You know, when the U.S. invaded Iraq, it destabilized that region and created conditions that led to the rise of ISIS, which is now destabilizing Syria, which is where a lot of these refugees and immigrants that we have banned are coming from. The U.S. is complicit in the Saudi-led war in Yemen, which has created one of the worst humanitarian crises of our lifetimes. And we've always had kind of like tension with Iran ever since we supported a coup that overthrew their democratically elected prime minister, and that's just been an ongoing source of really brutal economic and foreign policies. So I think just pointing out these intersections in both the domestic space and globally to me highlights two points. The first is that these links between the Muslim ban and the asylum ban and the links between these bans in U.S. foreign policy emphasizes the fact that our resistance to these policies has to be intersectional. And we have to understand that one law, one group of policies that's used to target one group of people can easily be used to target a different group of people and that we've seen through the Muslim and the asylum bans. At the same time, our resistance to these policies also has to take into account a sort of global understanding of the issue in a global framework because oftentimes policies that are enacted here in the U.S. have global repercussions and people across the world feel repercussions of things that we allow our lawmakers to sanction. So I think those are just two important principles to keep in mind when thinking about how do we kind of continue to resist abusive and discriminatory state policies. And then just one last point about the usefulness of courts. I think when the Supreme Court upheld the Muslim ban, it was a pretty disheartening moment for a lot of lawyers because just by virtue of our profession, we put a lot of faith in the courts. And I think that highlighted for a lot of folks that while maybe the courts can continue to be one avenue of redress, that they should not be the exclusive avenue of redress. And the real organizing and the real resistance and the real change happens when people organize and people get together and people change the narratives and change the stories that we tell about others because the courts never lead change, they always follow change. And I think we as people and we as communities and we as people of conscience have to create the change and change the narrative so that the courts and the legal system can then follow. Thank you.