Congressman Don Beyer says, “We have a constitutional crisis” over refusal to release travellers from Muslim-majority countries after judge grants temporary stay.
By Edward Helmore and Alan Yuhas / The Guardian
January 30, 2017
“We continue to face border patrol’s noncompliance and chaos at airports around the country,” said Marielena Hincapie, director of the National Immigration Law Center. Officials, she said, were “Kafkaesque” in their confused responses, adding that Trump’s order “has already caused irrevocable harm, it has already caused chaos.”
Customs and Border Protection (CBP) agents defied the orders of federal judges regarding Donald Trump’s travel bans on Sunday, according to members of Congress and attorneys who rallied protests around the country in support of detained refugees and travellers from seven Muslim-majority countries.
On Sunday afternoon, four Democratic members of the House of Representatives arrived at Dulles airport in Virginia on word that people had been detained and denied access to lawyers.
“We have a constitutional crisis today,” representative Don Beyer wrote on Twitter. “Four members of Congress asked CBP officials to enforce a federal court order and were turned away.”
Representative Jamie Raskin, also at the airport, tweeted that the federal agency had given “no answers yet” about whether agents were ignoring the courts. Raskin joined several other attorneys there, including Damon Silvers, special counsel at AFL-CIO, one of the groups trying to help visa holders.
“As far as I know no attorney has been allowed to see any arriving passenger subject to Trumps exec order at Dulles today,” Silvers tweeted on Sunday evening. “CBP appears to be saying people in their custody not ‘detained’ technically & Dulles international arrivals areas not in the United States.”
No one responded to calls or emails with questions about the court orders at Dulles CBP or the Department of Homeland Security (DHS), and the confusion played out in similar patterns at major airports around the country.
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