Scarsdale Attorney Files Amicus Brief for ADL Challenging Trump's Travel Ban

Scarsdale attorney John B. Harris is the principal author of an Amicus Brief to the U.S. Court of Appeals 9th Circuit on behalf of the Anti-Defamation League ("ADL") objecting to President Donald Trump's recent executive order to ban travel into the United States from seven majority-Muslim nations.

The brief is not a typical synopsis of legal issues. Rather, it is a review of the United States' long history of welcoming immigrants and the tragic consequences of times when America turned away from its core values, such as when the United States turned away Jewish refugees desperately seeking safety aboard the St Louis during World War II, excluded immigrants from China and interned Japanese Americans.

The brief quotes luminaries in American history such as John Winthrop who "admonished the future colonists of Massachusetts to always remember that their new community would be "as a city upon a hill." It recalls Walt Whitman, Emma Lazarus and John F. Kennedy who in his book "A Nation of Immigrants" wrote, ""America has always been a refuge from tyranny. As a nation conceived in liberty, it has held out to the world the promise of respect for the rights of man."

Harris' law firm, Frankfurt Kurnit Klein & Selz in Manhattan, submitted the brief on behalf of ADL where Harris is the Chair of the ADL Legal Affairs Committee. He said, "The U.S. has been and should be a beacon of hope for refugees from war-torn countries and for victims of persecution."

Read the entire brief here: