On January 31, 2017, the Arab American Civil Rights League (ACLR) and seven of its individual members filed this lawsuit in the U.S. District Court for the Eastern District of Michigan (in Detroit). The plaintiffs sued President Trump, the Department of Homeland Security, and U.S. Customs and Border Protection under the Declaratory Judgment Act (28 U.S.C. §2201), the Administrative Procedures Act (5 U.S.C. §5), and the Religious Freedom Restoration Act. They claimed that President Trump’s executive order (EO) of January 27, 2017, which banned entry into the US of refugees and nationals of seven predominantly Muslim countries violated these statutes as well as their Fifth Amendment rights to procedural due process, substantive due process, and equal protection. They also claimed the EO violated the First Amendment’s Establishment Clause by giving preference to Christian over Muslim refugees. The case was assigned to District Judge Victoria Roberts who referred proceedings to Magistrate Judge Stephanie Dawkins Davis.

On February 2, 2017, the same day that the plaintiffs filed a motion for a temporary restraining order (TRO), the court entered a permanent injunction barring the United States from applying Sections 3(c) and 3(e) of the Jan. 27, 2017 EO against lawful permanent residents of the United States. The plaintiffs subsequently withdrew their motion for a TRO, citing changed circumstances created by the entry of a nationwide TRO in State of Washington v. Trump. However, the plaintiffs continued to pursue a permanent injunction guaranteeing them the ability to travel outside the country and re-enter in the future.

Following President Trump’s replacement of the January 27 EO with a narrower EO on March 6, 2017, the plaintiffs filed an amended complaint arguing that this new EO was also discriminatory. Since the new EO definitively excluded lawful permanent residents from its scope, the plaintiffs filed a notice of voluntary dismissal on behalf of those plaintiffs who were lawful permanent residents.

Because a third iteration of the EO was issued on September 24, 2017, the district court allowed the plaintiffs to file another amended complaint. The plaintiffs filed their third amended complaint on September 13, 2018, arguing that the third EO violated the Establishment Clause, the First Amendment right to freedom of speech and association, and the Fifth Amendment equal protection guarantee. In this complaint, the ACLR was joined by the ACLU of Michigan, the American Arab Chamber of Commerce, the Arab American and Chaldean Council, the Arab American Studies Association, and five named plaintiffs. The plaintiffs sought to represent a class of all individuals in the US whose ability to reunify with family members who are citizens of the “designated countries” (Iran, Libya, Somalia, Syria, and Yemen) was interfered with by the renewed executive order. The amended complaint dropped the procedural and substantive due process claims, focusing instead on how the EO violated the Establishment Clause, equal protection, and the rights to freedom of speech and association. In addition to the defendants from the first complaint, the third amended complaint also named U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services, the State Department, the Department of Justice, and the Office of the Director of National Intelligence as defendants. The plaintiffs sought the following relief: 1) a permanent injunction prohibiting the defendants from implementing or enforcing the third EO against nationals of the designated countries; 2) a judgment declaring the third EO as unlawful and invalid; and 3) attorney’s fees and costs pursuant to the Equal Access to Justice Act.

The government filed a motion to dismiss the third amended complaint on October 15, 2018. The plaintiffs filed a reply brief to this motion on November 19, 2018. More than half a year later, on July 10, 2019, District Judge Roberts issued an order and opinion denying the government’s motion to dismiss. Judge Roberts held that the complaint sufficiently pleaded a claim that the third EO violated the Establishment Clause, the First Amendment’s protections of speech and association, and the Fifth Amendment’s guarantee of Equal Protection. 399 F. Supp. 3d. 717.

On July 23, 2019, the government moved for certification of the district court’s July 10 order so that the decision could be appealed to the Sixth Circuit Court of Appeals; the government also requested a stay of discovery pending resolution of the appeal. The government filed an answer to the third amended complaint on July 31, 2019. On August 6, 2019, the plaintiffs replied to the motion for certification, arguing that the government had not met the standard for a certificate of appealability and that a stay of discovery was not warranted. District Judge Roberts granted the defendant’s motion for certification but denied their motion to stay discovery on November 1, 2019. 2019 WL 5684371.

With the denial of their motion to dismiss certified, the government filed an appeal in the Sixth Circuit and asked the court of appeals to order the district court to stay proceedings pending resolution of the interlocutory appeal. In a November 26, 2019, order issued by Chief Judge Jeffrey Sutton and Circuit Judges Karen Nelson Moore and John Nalbandian, the court of appeals permitted an appeal on the denial of the motion to dismiss and ordered the district court to stay all proceedings, including discovery.

In the Sixth Circuit, the government filed its brief for the appeal on March 20, 2020, and the plaintiffs filed their brief on July 24. The court of appeals scheduled oral arguments for November 17, 2020. But before this could take place, on November 13, the court granted a November 10 motion by the plaintiffs to hold the case in abeyance until February 2, 2021. While the November 10, 2020, motion is not available on PACER, it was likely prompted by the news that Joseph Biden had won the 2020 presidential election and was planning on undoing a large number of President Trump’s executive orders. In addition to granting the motion to hold the case in abeyance, the Sixth Circuit ordered the plaintiffs' counsel to file a status report on settlement negotiations between the parties due on February 21, 2021.

Counsel for the plaintiffs filed the status report on February 1, 2021, and informed the Sixth Circuit that the parties agreed the appeal and the underlying lawsuit were moot because President Biden revoked the EO at issue on his first day in office, January 20, 2021. The parties filed a joint motion to dismiss the appeal as moot without prejudice and to remand the case to the distinct court with instructions to dismiss on February 8. Two days later, on February 10, 2021, Circuit Judges Raymond Kethledge, Bernice Donald, and Joan Larsen entered an order granting the joint motion to dismiss the appeal and remanded the case to the district court with instructions to dismiss as moot. Additionally, the three-judge panel vacated the July 10, 2019 denial of the defendants’ motion to dismiss stating that “mootness precludes us from reviewing the merits of that order.” The plaintiffs petitioned for a rehearing on the order to vacate in front of the original Sixth Circuit panel of Sutton, Moore, and Nalbandian, but this was denied on March 11, 2021, by Kethledge, Donald, and Larsen. This ended the case.

Julie Aust - 02/24/2017
Jamie Kessler - 11/21/2017
Taylor Brook - 03/22/2018
Eva Richardson - 04/23/2019
Kevin Longhany - 11/01/2019
Esteban Woo Kee - 07/10/2021


compress summary