 Good morning, and aloha, and welcome to Law Across the Sea. I am Mark Shklav. I am the host of Law Across the Sea, and today we are very privileged to have the Attorney General of the State of Hawaii as our guest, Douglas Chin. Doug Chin is the son of Chinese immigrants. He has worked in the Honolulu Prosecutor's Office, served as the managing director of the city and county of Honolulu, and has been in private law practice. In 2015, Governor David Ige appointed Doug Chin to become the State's Attorney General. Most recently Attorney General Chin has been in the news representing the State of Hawaii in a lawsuit against President Trump's executive order, which banned travel from certain Muslim majority nations and suspended the United States Refugee Program. Attorney General Chin, welcome, good to see you. Thank you for being here. Aloha. Aloha. It's a pleasure. Thank you very much. I'd like you first to maybe tell us a little bit about your background, briefly about your backgrounds, or how you got to Hawaii, because I know you weren't born in Hawaii. I wasn't born here, but my parents weren't born in the U.S. They came from China. My mom's father was actually a four-star general in the Chinese National Army, so it's not the Communist, but the national side. After the Communist took over, then my parents both, they left Communist China and they came out to the U.S. They were taken care of, taken in by a host family in Yakima, Washington. We were just talking about that. That's over in the central part of Washington State. A very nice area, by the way, very, very beautiful. Yeah, yeah, it is. So what a difference to go all the way from China to come out there, it's not even Seattle. It's like in the very middle of Washington State where they're just growing apples and a very homogenized community, to be sure. My name actually came from the host family, the father, who he was a doctor in the neighborhood. So that's where I got the name Douglas, was from that. So I think they really appreciated that family. Anyway, my parents were, they settled in Seattle and I was born and raised there, along with my sister. So actually one of the, I'll just say a parenthetical statement, which is that with everything happening now with this case that has gotten me talking about this issue and thinking about this issue, it really actually makes me appreciate and feel a lot more grateful for the sacrifice and the risk that my parents took when they came over from China to come to the U.S. I mean, I think they really, they had to leave behind their family. My father didn't even see his brother for 40 years after that, just because of the differences in the country. So pretty amazing. Yeah, well during that period of time, the relationship between China and the United States was on hold at best, you could say, if not black. Right, right. And so that's a big part of, you know, a big part of even the discussion that's happening right now is that prior to 1965, I was born in 66, so prior to 1965, then the U.S. actually had a lot of race-based classifications to keep people out, or even more than that nation of origin classifications. So that was the time of the Chinese Exclusion Acts. So my parents came in under an extreme vetting regime that brought them in. But they were also coming in under a presumption that there was something wrong with them. And that law got abolished in 1965 by Congress in favor of basically saying, okay, we can put in restrictions on immigration, you know, we can tighten the door, we can tighten the sleeve as much as we want. However, we're not going to do any sort of nation-based classifications that unfortunately seems to be happening right now. So you're familiar with that from your own personal experience, from your own parents? Right. Although I'll be honest, I don't know if it was really something that really occurred to me all the time. And I think until we see what's happening right now, maybe because a lot of us for the last 50 years and a half century have really taken what we've had for granted. Right. Right. And our parents don't talk about it. They don't. They don't. I understand that. They keep their mouths shut and they just move on with life. So as you can see, I pretty Americanized my sister and I are both Americanized. And I think it really, you know, and I think a lot of it had to do with their deliberate decision that they weren't going to include us in the suffering that they went through just so that we could be doing what we're doing. But you're old enough now to think about it. Yeah. At least think about it. Yeah, that's right. Yeah. That's right. Now, in 2015, you were appointed by the governor to be the attorney general of our state. Yeah. What is that job? What does it entail? And who are your clients as the attorney general of the state of Hawaii? Yeah. Well, I can say this. I've lived here for 27 years. I've had about 15 years in public service, mostly with the city and county. I was a prosecutor for most of that time. And then eventually I was the city manager or the managing director under Mayor Peter Carlisle. Being the state attorney general basically means that your client is the entire state of Hawaii, meaning that I'm thinking about state of Hawaii's interests, that it includes law enforcement. So that's a part of my job. But it also includes thinking about the state of Hawaii from a civil perspective, so from civil rights to constitutional rights to other civil liabilities that the state has to face. So all the citizens are your clients, or is that right, or is it the state itself, or what is that? Right. I appreciate that distinction, because then everybody says, well, I'm the client, then how can I do, you know, obviously I might have to take positions that some people will feel great about and some people won't feel so great about. The better way to answer is that I'm the lawyer for the collective state of Hawaii or the state of Hawaii as an organization, so state government. And so yes, so part of those duties is enforcing the laws of the state of Hawaii as well as its constitution and the laws of the United States, honestly, and it's also the constitution and laws, the constitution of the U.S. as well as Hawaii. Now, we're going to get into that right now. You've been in the news lately, you've been in the news talking about a lawsuit against the President of the United States for an executive order, and as I understand the executive order, and it's kind of, there's been a couple actually, as I understand it, it restricts travel from certain Muslim nations to the United States for 90 days, and it sits on hold, I guess, the refugee program for 120 days, and what is that all about? What is the state doing? What are we in? Why are you doing this? Please tell us. What's going on here? Right. Well, the timing couldn't be any more appropriate or I guess inappropriate for something like this to happen, but 75 years ago, I think a lot of people in Hawaii remember how we did have a President. It was President Roosevelt who, during World War II, had, for reasons of national security, basically ordered, did an executive order that required Japanese Americans, German Americans, and Italian Americans all to go into internment camps, and that included citizens. So it included taking people who had citizen rights and stripping them of those rights, all in the name of national security. And I think what was even the most chilling about reading that executive order from back then was the reasoning behind it. So it wasn't just that it was national security, it was actually saying that the reason why we're taking this drastic action against this nation is because even though there's people here amongst us who are in the U.S., we don't know which ones to trust. So in other words, we don't know whether one person is for the government or one person who's against the government. So that was one reason. And then the other thing that was put in there, as they said, culturally, they belong to a culture that is inconsistent with what the United States is all about. And so when you actually put that in the framework of what's happening now, it's a dog whistle. This is 120 days. This is just, I think people might say, insensitively, this is just Muslim nations in the Middle East. Why should we care about something like that? But to me, and I think to a lot of people that have really thought about this, this is a dark path that we don't want to go down. In other words, we have a new president. He may have policies that we disagree with, but when it comes to discriminating against people based upon their national origin or discriminating against people based on their religion, that becomes something that we all should be very concerned about. And so that's where it became incumbent upon me to really take some action. Okay. All right. So what action are you taking? What are you doing? Great. Yeah. So what we've done is we've asked for, along with some other states, the state of Hawaii has asked the courts to basically sort this out, to take a look at it. I mean, I'm probably soft-pedaling it a little bit, but it's an injunction. But that's the only way that... You're trying to get it to be stopped? Correct. Correct. Trying to get the travel ban executive order to be stopped on the basis that it's discriminatory against people based upon their national origin, it's discriminatory against them based upon their religion, and also based on the fact that the president and the administration can't really take back the statements that have been made all the way up until now. So essentially what you had was back as early as 2015 when President Trump was on the campaign trail. Actually, he's the one who came up with the words Muslim ban. That wasn't a word that the opponents came up with or the term that they came up with. He said that. He said, we need to ban Muslims from this nation. There are Syrian refugees who are pouring in and committing crimes. And when I become president, then I'm going to put a stop to that. Those kinds of incendiary statements, they didn't stop when he became the Republican nominee. It didn't stop when the first executive order came out as president. He went on a broadcast network and said, we're going to favor the Christians, we're going to let the Christians in, and we're not going to let it in Muslims. People might think, well, I have my own thoughts about that. It is good to favor Christians. You can have that opinion, but you can't do an order that violates the laws and the constitutions of our state. Or excuse me, of the country. It violates the laws of our state, but it definitely violates the laws of the country. And so that's where we felt like we needed to check the president. And basically, that's the checks and balances system that we're all a part of. So one state is doing this, Hawaii, and there's a few others. So there's several other lawsuits that are going on. Some of them are brought by individual plaintiffs, some are brought up by refugee awareness organizations. But another state that is involved right now is Washington, the state of Washington, Attorney General Bob Ferguson has been doing that. And there's been several states that have joined him. And I want to go a little more into the basis of our lawsuit after our break. Okay, great. So we'll have a break right now. Okay. Aloha, kakou. I'm Marcia Joyner, and I'm inviting you to navigate the journey. We are discussing the end of life options, and we would really love to have you every Wednesday morning at 11 a.m. right here. Aloha. This is Gordo the Tech Sour here at Hibachi Talk. I want to thank you guys for joining us every week from one o'clock in the afternoon to one thirty Hawaii time where we talk about tech. But this year we're kind of branching out and we're talking about all other interesting kinds of facts and figures. And Andrew, my security guy, will be joining us, as he always is, giving us a weekly security tip. And we will also then have Angus giving us some gadgets and some things that's really starting to irritate his okole. So we're going to have him coming out as well. Anyway, Drew, do you have anything you want to say? Glad to be here, man. Happy to help. There we go. Thanks again. Hibachi Talk. We'll see you soon. We are back with the Attorney General of the State of Hawaii, and we have been talking about a lawsuit that the Attorney General has brought on behalf of the State of Hawaii against an executive order by the President of the United States. Now, the executive order, and I'm going to read it correctly, says that it is to protecting the nation from foreign terrorists entry into the United States. End quote. Now, Attorney General, Chinn, isn't that a valid justification? What's wrong with that? That's a great title. And I think that's actually a great goal for a President to have. I think President Obama cared about that goal as well as well as President Bush and every other President. So I don't begrudge the federal government or even the current President for wanting to protect the nation from terrorists. A lot of us have that fear, and some people feel it even more deeply than others. I think where the problems start occurring is once you get beyond the title and start to read beyond to what goes on, because essentially what you have is this, it used to be seven nations, Muslim majority nations. Now it's six, but it's basically, the way it's worded, it now sets up this system where if you were from these six nations, you're presumptively a terrorist. So it doesn't matter if you're a baby, it doesn't matter if you're the spouse of a cardiologist who lives here in the U.S. or a fiancee of the cardiologist. It doesn't matter if you're the mother-in-law of someone who's prominent in our community, in the Muslim community, as we have our individual plaintiff who's involved. Those people are all presumptively a terrorist. And so within this new system that's been set up, the federal government has set up waivers and exemptions case by case basis that has no standards other than the fact that we're going to presume you're a terrorist and then you're going to have to get through everything. Well, that first part is really problematic for us. Why? What does it do? How does it violate our law or our constitution? Can't the president do this? Well, and I will say this, if I were just a commentator and I weren't a lawyer, I think I'd go right after the lack of logic behind it. So I think there's plenty of material out there about how there's nothing about these six nations, other than the fact that President Trump doesn't have businesses working in those places. There's nothing about these six nations that are particularly damaging in comparison to Egypt, which is still OK or Libya, not Libya, but Egypt or other Saudi Arabia, places like that. So there's a lack of logic that that's existing. But I'm not even approaching it from that standpoint because, you know what, you could have presidents that are illogical from a policy standpoint, that's fine. But from a legal standpoint, the Immigration and Nationality Act specifically in 1965 said that you cannot discriminate again. We're doing away with this racially biased, statistically faulty system of nation-based discrimination. We're doing away with that. And that's what you talked about at the beginning of our program, as when your parents came in they still had perhaps that problem was still the law, but now the Congress has decided, no, we're not going to do that. So exactly. And so part of our legal argument is actually another checks and balances argument. It's just that the President doesn't have the authority to step into something that Congress has already set forth in the Immigration and Nationality Act. So the easy way to think about that in social studies is just that Congress, that branch, they make the laws, and the executive branch, the president, enforces the laws. So what we're seeing in this executive order is the president is basically making a new immigration law that now lays on top of what Congress has already set out. Congress had standards about what is a terrorist. There's actually, they had standards like in the Immigration and Nationality Act, which says that if you have reasonable grounds to believe that somebody's a terrorist, or some sort of standard, like a reasonable suspicion or something like that. But instead what we have now is this new standard of, if you're from these six countries, you are a terrorist. Because you are from a country like Syria, or I think Iraq was off it now, but certain countries, and that was because, why were they selected? Not a very good reason. And actually the new executive order, actually in fairness, it's definitely papered better. The first executive order was Buck Naked. It really had no data at all to back up why these seven countries are there. So the new executive order actually has some examples of people who committed crimes from these different countries. But even when we look at those examples of these are people from Somalia who committed crimes, or these are people from Yemen who did something. Those isolated incidents are decades old. If you really thought that this was such a big issue, you would have set it up front. And that's what's a little bit scurry about this whole thing is that it's backwards. It's usually, did you know that they actually have an executive order on executive orders, which kind of describes, this is how executive orders usually come out. It's that usually an agency brings up a concern, so they have data, they raise it to the attention of the president and then the president is able to rely upon that past information in order to be able to make some sort of executive order. This is the backwards. In other words, he already said he had a Muslim ban. He tells Rudy Giuliani, he then tells the world, the president came and said, I want to have a Muslim ban, tell me how to do it legally. That's all in the public record. And then now we are trying to fit in facts in order to be able to justify a discriminatory intent. Now I don't want to say something that you're not saying, but it sounds to me like you're saying that the president made a campaign promise that he's now trying to fulfill. Right. That he said we're going to keep out Muslims and he's looking for a way to do it and he came up with these six or seven countries that are Muslim dominated or majority and he said, well, we'll start there. Right. Is that an accurate way to say what you've said? You and I both don't know. We're really not in any place where we're qualified to say what President Trump was thinking about. But that's my guess. That's my guess and I'll tell you why. It's because I've been in government long enough to know about what happens behind the scenes and so one of the things that happened is between the first executive order and the second executive order, there were a lot of days, right? And so they were supposed to come out within two days and instead it took more than 30 to come out with something. To me, I've been in government long enough to know that that means people were arguing behind the scenes about what they were going to put out and I think eventually what you still have is something that people, I think they got locked in. I think they got locked in and said, you know, we've got to stick to these countries even though there's no basis for it and so there's a lot of new justifications for it, but it's just not good enough. Well, you know, I think sometimes as lawyers we do things, we see how things appear and we sometimes have to address that because we can't guess what goes on in people's minds. Right. And so the appearance and what the after effects or the consequences of those appearances we sometimes address, even though, yes, we cannot tell what's going inside, what motivates people and even though they say certain things, as lawyers we are kind of trained to doubt. Right. Sometimes that's what they're saying and there's a way to do it. Make it right. Do the right thing. And it doesn't appear that maybe that's what's happening in your opinion, right? Right. And it could be, I mean actually I think if I gave the new administration every benefit of the doubt and I think we probably would all like to do that. It's a lack of experience. It's a lot of people who are coming in that don't understand the different checks and balances and requirements of the government or the Constitution. But I think we as the checkers, as the people who are going to challenge it, we need to be able to raise this to the executive branch's intention that this is not the right way to go about doing it. If you already start excluding these six nations and everybody's okay with that and everybody lets it go. Where does it go next? Yeah, where does it go next? And I think people would go berserk actually if it was a different set of country. Okay, now let me dive into that a little bit. Okay, we have other problems in Hawaii. Yes. We have homelessness. We have environmental problems. We have bad roads. Why are we spending money on this? I mean why are we taking money from taxpayers, your clients, or your collective clients, and spending money? Why are we doing this? I think really hard about this. Well it's within my litigation budget to do this and actually the whole, for the three budget cycles that I've gone through, I've never exceeded the litigation budget. So it's within what's been allocated to me to be able to do something like this. But I think even more than that, this is a serious constitutional and societal concern that I think the people of Hawaii need to care about. We don't want to be a state that is silent about this kind of discriminatory laws. We can't be. I actually, you know, it's probably too strong for me to say, but I even feel like it would be disrespecting what's happened in the past if we were to somehow repeat history by allowing things to go in a certain discriminatory direction and to not say anything about it. You know, I do believe that's part of our role. You know, the president is not the king, he's not a dictator. We have a system of checks and balances. When we see something that's unconstitutional or discriminatory, then by golly we should challenge it. We should say something. Because, and a lot of, you were talking about the internment of Japanese during World War II by an executive order. And not many people stood up and talked at that point. Is that my impression of what you're saying, too? I don't think I could, I think I'd have a hard time knowing what to do. I don't mean to be overly dramatic, but I'd have a hard time living with myself if I hadn't said anything. I think that'd be difficult. We only have a couple minutes left. You met with the president. I did, I did. So quickly I'll tell you about that. It was the morning before he addressed the joint session of Congress, so actually if you recall that was a very special day where he actually was presidential, it was very civil. So he was in that tone as well, and I got the chance to be able to ask him about the upcoming travel ban and find out what was his thinking behind it, what was his purpose behind this travel ban executive order. And his answers were, he wanted to make America safe again, it involved extreme vetting, which we know is a Muslim ban, but he also said that we may not like it, but that was just a priority of his. Kind of at a talking point, high level. But I don't begrudge him for that either. I think ultimately it's not... He was cordial. He was cordial. He was cordial. He asked me whether we were one of the state food students, and I said yes we did, but even that wasn't... I'm going to get you now. I think he really was just trying to understand what the context was. So that was civil, and in the same way, I think we need to civilly object and civilly respectfully challenge these executive orders. And you seem to be doing that, and thank you very much. I appreciate your time this morning, and I know you're busy and have a meeting of attorney generals that's going on right now. Sure do. Yeah, it's very exciting. There's many more things that we have in common than we have where we're apart. So this is a bipartisan group of Republicans and Democrats that are all meeting in Honolulu as previously scheduled. So we're here this week to talk about the issues that we have in common, which are good ones. Good luck.