Migrant and Muslim in Trump's America: From Street Protests to Court Battles

Description

In recent months, President Trump has stepped up his anti-immigration campaign. The President declared his intention to end the DACA “Dreamers” program, which has until now kept hundreds of thousands of young people safe from deportation. The Supreme Court is set to review Trump’s “Muslim ban” in a matter of weeks, while the Trump administration makes it increasingly difficult for Muslims to enter the United States using tools other than the blanket Muslim ban. Meanwhile, Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents have arrested thousands of undocumented persons across America, breaking apart families and sparking nationwide demonstrations and lawsuits. Will courts defer to the President on these policies or challenge him? Will street protests and popular mobilization have any effect on either the Trump administration or the Courts?

To answer these crucial questions, the Faculty of Law at the University of Toronto, in collaboration with the Islam and Global Affairs Initiative and the Global Justice Lab at the Munk School of Global Affairs, is pleased to host a dynamic discussion panel with leading experts on national and international security and the US courts system.

Join Shirin Sinnar, a John A. Wilson Faculty Scholar and Associate Professor of Law at Stanford Law School, and other leading scholars as they dive into pressing issues on rights, liberty and democracy, immigration, national security, and the role of institutions and mass resistance.

Speakers:
Shirin Sinnar is the John A. Wilson Faculty Scholar and Associate Professor of Law at Stanford Law School. She writes and teaches on the role of institutions, including courts and executive agencies, in protecting individual rights and democratic values in the national security context. Her scholarship also addresses the procedural dimensions of civil rights and national security litigation, domestic intelligence-gathering and profiling, and the impact of counterterrorism policies on U.S. minority and immigrant communities. Her articles have been published in the Harvard Law Review, Stanford Law Review, Georgetown Law Journal, Harvard Civil Rights-Civil Liberties Law Review, and other journals. In 2016, Sinnar was selected by the graduating class at Stanford Law School as the recipient of the John Bingham Hurlbut Award for Excellence in Teaching. Prior to joining Stanford Law School as a Thomas C. Grey Fellow in 2009, Sinnar spent five years representing individuals facing discrimination based on government national security policies and unlawful employment practices, first at the Lawyers’ Committee for Civil Rights of San Francisco and then at the San Francisco-based Asian Law Caucus. Sinnar earlier served as a law clerk to the Honorable Warren J. Ferguson of the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals. She is a graduate of Stanford Law School, Cambridge University, and Harvard and Radcliffe Colleges.

Aisha Ahmad is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Political Science and Co-Director of the Islam and Global Affairs Initiative at the Munk School of Global Affairs. Her work explores the political economy of Islamist power in weak and failed states. She has conducted field research in Afghanistan, Pakistan, Somalia, and Kenya. In 2012, she was a fellow at the Belfer Center on Science and International Affairs at the Harvard Kennedy School.

Carmen Cheung is a Professor of Global Practice at the Munk School of Global Affairs, where she also serves as the Executive Director of the Global Justice Lab and the Associate Director of the Trudeau Centre for Peace, Conflict, and Justice. Her research and practice focus on security and human rights, and state responses to threats to public safety and security. She has acted as counsel in public interest cases in the U.S. and Canada, including litigation over the use of torture and extraordinary rendition by the U.S. government, and an inquiry into the transfer of Afghan detainees by Canadian Forces to risk of torture.

Moderator:
Mohammad Fadel is an Associate Professor in the Faculty of Law at the University of Toronto, with a specialization in Islamic Law. He has published extensively in leading legal journals on family law in the Islamic tradition, international human rights law, and the compatibility between Islamic and liberal democratic legal traditions.