She Helped Create "Chaos at the Airports" after Trump's Muslim Ban

guest today, Becca Heller. Her organization, the International Refugee Assistance Project, deployed an army of volunteer lawyers to the airports. One of them obtained a court order forbidding deportations. As Trump's court troubles grew, he essentially gave up for a while the good guys had won. Heller was an overnight celebrity on every nightly news show. She got a New York Times profile, a Daily Show appearance, and a MacArthur Genius grant.

I WRAP tripled its budget in a year. Now, almost two years later, Heller has helped over two hundred thousand migrants and refugees stay in the United States. It would be heroic work for anyone, but especially so for someone in their mid thirties with a toddler and a pile of student loans. Where do her energy and courage come from? As it turns out, the answer is suburbia. My dad

was a cardiologist. My parents are both still Have'm using past tense just because they're retired, not because anything tragic happened. But I was a cardiologist in my mom todd Public School where I grew up in the Bay Area. I have many siblings. I have one younger brother. And what's he doing now? He's not solving the immigration problem he is. I think he's day trading, is how you would describe. Okay, school,

someone's got to do that. Yeah, someone gonna take the money that you have in your budget and invested somewhere. He's not trading our budget. He's not helping your budget. He's not even hoping me personally. I've asked him what I should do with my money, and he doesn't want to be responsible if I lose it all. I had a dear friend that might say the same thing to me. I said, what should I do in terms of the business manager to invest my money? He goes what he goes,

What would I do? Or what do I think you should do? How different? He said, I would never tell you to do what I did. I don't want that responsibility. And now, so you grew up in the Bay Area and through high school were you an activist to what

were you doing? I was like, I want to be activist, Like I had all these ideas for things all the time, and I felt sort of very empathic towards especially homelessness is a very visible manifestation of area in the Bay Area, you know, because the weather is good, right, it's a tolerant community to like, there's a there's a level of homeless and you just don't see on Park Avenue in the seventies and I live in the village and you see quite a bit of it because that community down

is a lot more tolerant, right. And you know, we'll see if tech changes that for better, right. But I think, you know, that was so visible, and I remember always being really worked up by that and having these big ideas of you know, when I was ten, I was like, I'm gonna do a blanket drive and then just not doing it because I think I don't know if I felt dis empowered, or I just felt scared or I didn't know my own You had the passion, but you

didn't follow through. Yeah, pretty like many people, I think. And then you go to Dartmouth, y u S. Darmouths like of all the IVS is like the most animal house of the ivs. Is that is that fair? You think I can't roll with animals? No, I'm I'm closing my eyes. I'm thinking about you like having a blanket drive up there, and and well, here's the thing. I never did the blanket drive, right, I'm the person who wanted to and then went to Darmouth instead. No, I

actually I had an amazing time at Darmouth Dartmouth. I messed up applying to college the first time around. Um. I applied to two schools early, and one of them found out and told the other, and they both rescinded my offer of admission, and I took a year off and I did AmeriCorps Um, which I would pinpoint as sort of like the turning point of when I realized that I need to re say that, because I dropped that on the table and it made a weird echoing.

I think people can tell, right, away. This is going to be a very bumpy interview, Aracor. It's the kind of domestic peace corps. Where So, where did you go? I stayed at home because they don't pay you very much, So I lived with my folks, and I was working at an elementary school in Berkeley on sort of broadly equal opportunity education stuff. And they just gave us this big budget and they were like, do programming to help fight institutional oppression. And I was like, I don't know

what that means. I don't know how to do that, but I'm gonna give it a shot. And then I think, much to my surprise, it turned out there was a lot of things that that we could do collectively. Um. Now, when you leave school, when you leave Dartmouth, you go to law school, you go right one to the other. You take another gap. Oh no, I took I took two years. What you doing that? Two years? I was in Malawi for a year on a full bright um and then I actually went to Vermont for a year,

partly for a boy partly for a job. I ended up working on the Freedom to Marry campaign in Vermont. Did you find you had to kind of a peripatetic nature. You like moving around, and you weren't married at the time, you had no kids, And did you find now is the time for me to go to Malawi? For Were you were there for like a year? Right? Yeah? I was there for a year. I still I am pretty peripatetic. Actually, I get really claustrophobic if I stay in one place

for too long. Um. I like to move around. I think the world is just completely fascinating. I like to see as much as your husband's share of that passion with you or he's he has like a huge zest

for life. He doesn't like long plane rides as much as I do, but yeah, he loves to travel and I'm taking Actually, Um, the day after Trump was elected, I couldn't really get out of bed, but I went to the Brooklyn Public Library and got my kid, who was one at the time, a passport because just I professionally help people flee UM, and I like, if this all goes to ship, I'm not going to not be

able to get across the Canada border. Because she has a different last name from me, but she's never actually traveled internationally. But in in January, taking her and my mom to Costa Rica, which I'm really excited about. I want I want her to be equally parapedetic. What was your awareness of Malawi and what was going on in Malawi before you showed up there. Well, I had been in Zimbabwe on and off for the year before doing

what work. On paper, I was helping build community gardens as a response to HIV related malnutrition at public health clinics. But I think when you're you know, if you're an activist and you're deep in the middle of a problem, you're always like, what's the root cause of this? Right? And in Zimbabwe, the root cause of this was like the ruling party, So I ended up getting involved in some political opposition stuff um and ended up needing to

leave the country. What kind of gardens community community gardens to address malnutrition in the HIV community? That sounds pretty benign and pretty wonderful. What do you land in Zimbabwe knowing that the government and the status quo needs to be addressed, or do you learn that there land the accidental activist or you're predisposed both. I mean I didn't.

I would say that I landed aware of the problems because I do my homework, so like I landed knowing that ZANU p F, which was the ruling party, had said no one can buy maize meal, which is the staple food without a political party membership card, which means that like it doesn't matter how sick you are, in order to get food, you have to say that your loyalty right literally or starved to death. So, like I knew that, I didn't go in there saying, oh, I'm

gonna fix that. I'm going to address that, you know, but eventually couldn't help yourself. I mean, I stumbled into a meeting of the opposition party and had some feelings. I mean, I think I was primed in a way that like, I'm not afraid of a good fight on behalf of a good cause. But I also I think going into on place, especially with like a fighting mentality, is usually like really unproductive. Tell me about it. Yeah, I think historically America hasn't been that good at not

doing that. Um, So I didn't go in saying like, oh, I'm gonna struggle for regime change, but I went in being like, there's a problem, which is that like really sick people don't have access to immune boosting foods. And this was before anti retroviral therapy was really widely available. And you know, HIV doesn't kill you. What it does is weaken your immune system, and then you get a secondary infection that kills you. So nutrition becomes really important.

So I had this like theory that I thought might work, but I went in knowing that it was just a theory and that really, like I didn't know shit about ship and so I was open to learning that the problem had other facets and there might be a better way to Yeah, political or not. What kind of facilities

did you live in? I lived with a family. I originally actually was living with a black family because I had this weird concept of like solidarity that like, oh, just because I'm privileged and have a cell phone, like doesn't mean I should get to stay in a fancy house, like I should stay in the township like everybody else. And then one night some rocks were thrown in the window and the rocks said ma zongu on them, which means like, white person, go back to the embarcadera. I'm

from the East Bay, so I don't mess around. Um. It was a sort of awakening moment for me of like, oh, that's solid aarity doesn't mean that I like pretend that we're the same. How much longer did you last in Zimbabwe? That was the beginning, and so what happened after that? I kept doing the same work, but I moved in with a white family so that I wasn't like putting people in danger with my physical presence. So what is the end game there? I mean, when did you realize

it was time to get out of there? Well, I got to report it, like someone comes to your going the I got picked up by the local police and take into a police station and uh, they like held me in an office for seven hours, and I started out really scared, and then by the end, I just like had to pee worse than I've ever had to pee in my life. And then they came in and they're like, you need to leave the country. We're going to take you to the airport. And I was like, great,

can we stop my bathroom please? And that was kind of and then they the family ship me my stuff like came home. What happened? What'd you start doing? That was when I got the full bright to go to Malawi. And then I went to Malawi for a year, and what was the work in Malawi. I was working for the Malawian government. What did the Malawian government want you to do? I was working for their Ministry of HIV AIDS and Malnutrition, and they wanted me to write their

like five year HIV AIDS and Malnutrition. Probably yeah, but you know, I'm twenty three. I still don't know anything about these issues. They wanted someone who could write fluently in English, that they could submit proposals to the World Health Organization to get funding. And then when you were there for a year, Yeah, did you accomplish what you wanted to accomplish in Malawi? Not remotely. Should we look back on that year, how do you characterize that year?

I was bored and you learned? I don't know if I I mean, I came back opposed to foreign aid. Why for a bunch of reasons. I mean, one, I feel like a lot of it gets lost to corruption. To I feel like it displaces the growth of a real middle class. I think that if you know, in Malawi, for example, um, some huge amount of their g d P was in the form of foreign aid. And if like America keeps subsidizing farmers to grow a bunch of food, we don't use and then dumps that food for free

on countries like Malawe. It becomes really hard from Allowyan farmers to ever grow anything market take care of themselves. Right, So it just created infantalize the culture there. Yeah, and it it prevented any real local economic growth. To your board, You're like, what do I do? Let's go to Yale law school? Now. Then I chased a boid of Vermont because I thought I really missed Vermont and i'dywre there for how long? For a year? And in pursuit of

helping gay men and women get married? Did you end up getting married to the boy you chased it for? Monty? Did you close that deal? I did not. We I am married to someone else. Once that guy you chased everyone found that he can get married to a guy. He wouldn't marry a guy. That must have been what happened? Why else would we not be together anymore? How long were you in VERMONTI here, so it seems like a year or your shelf lest well, it was in your youth.

Are you saying I'm not in my youth anymore? But like in your pre youth? You invite me onto your podcast and you tell me I'm no longer in my year, in your natal stage and your prenatal stage when I was an embryo nine months was my shelfy Um, No, I did a lot of stuff for here. I mean, I think I think most people in their early twenties should do that, like a year or two. I think

your twenties is a time tops of issues. Yeah, exactly, you like you don't know what floats your boat, like try out a bunch of stuff like that's your I always tell people that I said, either before you go to college in this way of a gap year, which I just love that idea, said don't go to college, I said, take a year off and work at travel. If you can take a gap year is the I mean, I didn't do it on purpose, but it's the best

thing that ever happened to me. So then when when you just said to go to law school and why I think I've was kind of known I was going to go to law school, did you feel that that was just like that was a that you wanted in your chamber. I didn't know kind of like which social justice just us I wanted to take on. But I felt like whatever I was working on like at a certain point, you just run up against the law, and I wanted to know if a law degree was a way to kind of get over that hurdle, and I

worried that it wasn't. How do you describe your gears in law school? Intense? It was a lot. I mean, Gale's nice because they don't make you take any classes. So I basically just did clinics, which is where you work on cases directly. I founded I RAP in law school. We're gonna get to that, yeah, yeah, But I mean I just I did I WRAP. I did like the human rights clinic. I did the immigration clinic. I got to like depose racist cops. That was pretty fun. Uh

in New Haven in Danburry? How did that go over? Oh? I loved it and we won the case? Did you get deported from Connecticut? So when you found I wrap? How does that idea come to you? How does the the idea of im ration is the issue that becomes your creed decur obviously for the last several years. How

out did that happen? When I came to law school, I thought I wanted to do international human rights law, and then I realized that that's mostly pr like when when an international human rights court rules on something, it's not really binding, right, Like they can hold that this thing that the US does is illegal and the US is free to keep doing it. And what happens is there will be an article that the like YadA YadA, YadA, court ruled that this country is behaving illegally. But usually

it doesn't actually lead to anything in practice. The sort of naming and shaming element of the sort of public relations nature of human rights law is really important. It just didn't interest me as the thing I wanted to be doing every day, because I wanted something a little toothier. And so I got really interested in an asylum law because it's people who are fleeing international human rights violations and then looking for a remedy that will actually help

them kind of restart their lives. There's you know, they've fled something really awful, They've gotten to a place where they think they can be safe, and they're trying to stay. So it felt like a way that I could address the fallout of international human rights violations, but in a way that had concrete meaning, even if it was on you know, a person by person scale, rather than like a nation by nation scale. So you decided to set it up? How and where? What's the physical operation there?

There wasn't one for a long time. I mean, I have a cell phone. I don't even know if I had a self I guess I had a cell phone. I didn't have an iPhone. I sort of wandered into the issue. I was doing an internship between my first and second years of law school, and the NGO I was with just sort of didn't have enough for me to do. And I really hate that, like I hate wasting my time. Well, also, you know we're all going to die, so the minutes are important. To see all

the painties in the museum before I started with my childhood. Yeah, I mean that that's very exciting and very admirable. But you've been doing this for how long though? Six years, seven years, eight to ten, depending on a long long time. Yeah, I've improved my shelf life by in order of magnitude you're in. I'm in. I as the Hotel California for me, as I thought, I go startra or the Eagles, and I want the Eagle. I'm always down. Okay, I hate the fucking Eagles. Man. Know, I was quoting the Big

LASKI we're doing overlapping cultural references. I know, I was trying to hang eagles. I love it when when when law school ends, well here's what happened. I am really obsessed with efficiency, going back to my mortality thing a little bit. But I also just like, I'm not It's not about ego for me, right, I'm not like, oh, I want to start an organization, like I actually really didn't. People go to law school not knowing what they want to do, and I actually went to law school wanting

to be a lawyer. Like I love the practice of law. Um, it's just like it's it mirrors how my mind works. Really well, I think, yeah, I don't do that really, uh, because that's not It turns out running an organization isn't about like doing the programming of the organization basically. Like I I met with these refugees in Jordan's after quitting this internship in Israel, and they all just needed legal assistance. Um. They were you know, they can't go back to a

rock because something terrible happened to them. They can't stay in Jordan because they have no status, that can't work, Their kids can't go to school, they can't get healthcare, they could be deported at any time for whatever reason. There's only one direction they can go, right, and and the process of deciding sort of who gets to go in that direction and how and then who has to get on a raft across the Mediterranean or who has to go back to Syria and get killed is just

incredibly legalistic, super arbitrary, really complicated and bureaucratic. So I was like, oh, you need a legal advocate, Like this is a legal process. Your life depends on the outcome. If I were in illegal proceeding and like the death penalty were on the line, the thing I would want the most would be a good lawyer. So, for example, to distill this part of it down, because I want to think about it, I want to I want to get in this theoretically for a minute where someone can't

go back because that means death. Like, I understand them getting all the help they can, But do you think that there should be limitations on immigration in this country? And where do people who are typically line up on the opposite side of the issue than you, Where do you think they're right? I think mostly the problem with how we can suptualize of immigration policy in this country is that we look at it in a vacuum. I think you can't answer, you know, I get asked like,

do you think there should be an open border? Do you think do you think we should let in as many immigrants as possible? I think it's an irrelevant question. I think as long as we're or I think the

answer is yes. As long as we continue to overthrow democratically elected governments and rape countries of their natural resources such that there's no political stability or jobs, I think we shouldn't be surprised when people have to flee those places and show up here where all the resources have landed. So to me, like, as long as our economic and foreign policies are what they are, it seems really hard to decouple our border policy. Think the United States is

responsible directly. MS thirteen exists because we overthrew governments and then deported people back there. M S thirteen was deported from l A to l Salvador. I mean, it's just you know, and for decades, like for the whole the isis of Central America we made in the sense that we made it sure like how many democratically elected leaders did the CIA overthrow in Central America in the eighties,

like tons like we destabilized that region. And then prior to that, you know, with like United Fruit Company, like we created plantations, we enslaved the population, We took most of their natural resources and took them here, like we prevented the growth of local economies. We did everything possible over the last hundred years to destabilize them. And now you know this whole idea that like, oh, people are

only coming because there's no jobs. It's like, well, the fact that there's no jobs is what leads to like drug violence, gang violence, murders, domestic violence, and that's kind of on up. We point the finger there and say it's a mess, and it's us. We may it's our mat to a large degree. Yeah, I don't remember immigration being this hot of an issue politically, hasn't been in

the sixties, seventies, eighties. Government has made it a higher priority to use its power to persecute immigrants than they ever had. But I don't know that anti immigrant sentiment is necessarily that different. I think it's being stirred up right, I think it's more activated. But I think you know, you go back to you know, I went on this kick on on July four this year, I read seventeen seventy six and an attempt to remember that like revolution

on American soil was once possible. Um, they hated immigrants then, like you know, the immigrants were the Irish, and then later the immigrants were the Germans, and then they were the Italians. But that you know, we've always hated immigrants. There's a you know, the first ever Supreme Court case saying you can't discriminate against people based on national origins from the end of the nineteenth century about Chinese immigrants, um,

who were being sort of systematically discriminated against. And the Supreme Court was like, no, you can't, you can't do that under this constitution. But it took the Supreme Court stepping in two and it didn't fix it. I was

going to say, to fix it, but it didn't fix it. UM. So I think, you know, and of course, like I'm Jewish, um, and you think about the St. Louis, which is the you know, the ship carrying Jews fleeing the Holocaust that went from port to port to port in the very beginning of World War two, and and no one would let it dock and eventually it had to go back to Europe, and they traced the futures of most of

those people and most of them died in Auschwitz. Um and and America basically said, like, we would rather send these people to their death than have to admit Jews as refugees. That doesn't feel that different to me. Um It just like, is is really tragic that we can't seem to learn from our mistakes. Lawyer and refugee advocate Becca Heller of the International Refugee Assistance Project. There are now more refugees in the world persecuted and unable to

go home than at any time in history. Only the end of war and hunger can keep people from trying to move to save for countries. The medical charity Doctors Without Borders, known by its French acronym MSF, is on the ground wherever violence or disaster strike. Their international president, Joanne Lou joined me on here's the thing and talked about her experience working in Czechenia. You are putting other

people in danger. We were on the attack on a regular basis, that's one thing, but the threat of being abducted was so huge and we knew that if something were ever to happen to the MSF staff, then we will pull out, So we were praying for not It was so nerve wracking out of fear. Yeah, and I hate that because you know this, this is so self centered and compared to what all those people are going through.

Come on, get a grip on yourself. Here the rest of that interview in our archive at Here's the Thing dot org. After the break what really went on behind the scenes and in the spotlight after the Muslim band came down. This is Alec Baldwin and you were listening to Here's the Thing now more with the hero of the Trump resistance on refugee policy, Decca Heller. When did you realize that Trump had a viable candidacy? Were you even paying attention to that? I'm sure you. I'm assuming

you were. And when you sit there and go, oh my god, he's gonna take this thing and there there's plenty of kindling on the ground and he's squirting lighter fluid all over the floor. Honestly, not until not until

they called Pennsylvania. I mean, we like I remember, um, like we were really excited for election night because we're like oh, we're gonna eat popcorn and like watch come up and happened and and show that like you can't win an election based on hate, and we like you know, had beer and other things that I don't want to say on the radio, and we put our kids to bed. You can let it rip. I mean I I don't want to get my bar membership revoked. No, no, don't

you dont don't, don't, don't do that. We could let it rip in the studio, but just don't like that in here, put that out, put it out. But we I think everyone had this experience of just like this, did you in the campaign? You sensed he was different, You sensed he was nuts. I mean I knew. I followed it really closely, like I knew it was happening. And I was one of those people who was like, don't worry about it. Hillary is totally gonna win. There's

no way she doesn't. I completely had my head in the sand, like um, And I remember going to bed waiting for them to call Wisconsin, and I woke up at like three thirty and my husband was too o'cock welcome. Yeah. I woke up and passed and woke up at three. Yeah, my computer. My husband was on his phone, and I was like, you know, did they call Wisconsin? And he

was like, they called Pennsylvania. I was, I was my wife and I fell asleep because we got you know, a lot of little kids, and my wife literally like she was because she wasn't so miserable and tired because of breastfeeding the baby, and my oh god, and she just passed out again. Yeah. No, that was the same, except for not passing out again. I just like spent the rest of the night and sort of a series of panic attacks. But yeah, no, I I didn't see

it coming. I really didn't. And part of that is because I'm, you know, the bicoastal elite who like I went from California to New England to New York, Like, apparently I have no idea what's happening in the middle

of the country. January seventeen, everybody's at the airport. Describe what happened, Yeah, I mean it started the three Actually, so Trump gets sworn in on the twenty, he takes the weekend off to go golfing because why why would the president work on the weekends, and everyone sort of waiting to see, like of the various awesome things that he's promised you during the campaign. What's going to come

down first? And Monday, the travel being actually leaks to us. Um, someone takes a photograph of a desktop monitor in the White House, sends it to someone who sends it to someone who sends it to us, and it has the text of the travel ban on it. And we're like, oh, so, And we knew it was coming right, Like, it was not a secret that Trump didn't want refugees coming in from Syria, and we assumed that we'd be grappling with that at some point. We didn't know that it would

be like one of the first things to occur. So we start We have a number of clients who have permission to enter the US, but who haven't left yet because it takes a long time to sort of sell everything you own, tie up all your loose right to back, right to give up your entire Yeah, I mean, you know, he was a lot younger and didn't have a family. So we start calling our clients and saying up and get on a plane, like whatever, like take the hit on the loss of your house and and get on planes.

And you're saying clients you're saying the organization had had a relationship with these people. We need to get out. We represent thousands of individuals, Thus, how fine a bunch of ways. We have offices in the field, We have the NGOs and the u N re our cases to us um the budget of six and a half billion

dollars that kind of outreach. Yeah. Yeah, we have four people whose full time job it is just to like reply to every inquiry where we get because so many refugees just reach out to like hundreds and hundreds of people and here nothing. And we feel like, at the very least, like if you're sort of a voice crying

out in the darkness, you you deserve an answer. And usually we try to also provide a helpful answer with like legal advice, and then we take on their legal cases too, and we actually the the u N refers cases to us. That was what originally triggered me to realize I needed to do this full time. Was when the un called the summer between my second and third years in law school and asked if they could refer

cases to us. First, I was really flattered, and then I was just like ship, like, you don't have anyone else to call like I'm not even a lawyer, Like someone has to do this, you know. But so we had a bunch of clients and a couple dozen who had permission to enter but hadn't come yet. So we reached out to all of them and we were just like,

get on a plane, well spot the plane tickets. We got law firms to cover them, and then UM, that Wednesday, we had a transgender client flying into l a X. And with transgender clients, it's always really tricky when they fly because their documentation doesn't match how they present, and usually you worry about that when they're exiting UM, and

this time we were. I was really worried about that when they entered, because I was like, they might be looking for like any excuse to funk with anybody coming in from one of these seven countries if the band comes down. And so we arranged for a lawyer to just like surreptitiously hang out in the arrivals area of l a X and make sure that this woman had the lawyer's contact info in case anything went wrong with

her entry, and thankfully it didn't. UM. But that night I was g chatting with my policy director and she was like Oh, thank goodness, the band didn't come down today. And I was like, oh, because this woman was able to make it in. And Betsy was like, yeah, all the other people who are on her flight, and I

was like, holy sh it, this band comes down. Whenever that is, there's gonna be thou of people who are in the air who had legal permission to enter the US when they took off and are going to land essentially as undocumented, and nobody knows what's going to happen to them. And I had spent a lot of time between November nine and January twenty being like, what tools do we have to deploy in this upcoming war on refugees? Right? And the biggest thing we had was this army of lawyers.

So we had put some thought into how can we organize that, what we want to do with it? So I was like, we should organize lawyers to go to all the airports. So we emailed our network and organized lawyers to go to every international airpart lawyers we organized six d and then I don't know how many it ultimately ended up being, I mean thousands of thousands, yeah, I mean. And the cool thing was that, like for the first couple of days, like we were organizing most stuff,

and then everyone started self organizing, um, which was amazing. UM. Like I remember being at JFK and there was this just like super competent guy sort of like assigning people tasks and and I've hadn't slept because we were trying to file the lawsuit, which we can talk about, and so of a mess. And I remember thinking I should recruit him, and I pulled him aside at one point. I was like, who are you, Like, what do you do and and he was like, oh, I work at McKenzie.

And I was like, yeah, are you happy there? He's like I love it. And I was like, all right, good to meet you. You know, next, how many people did you get into the country? Two thousand in partnership with other n g o s and a ton of lawyers and you know, I mean it wasn't kept in telling if you kept in touch with them and monitored them, and they all still here. I have no idea, you have no idea. I literally don't know their names. We wouldn't know the number if the a c LU hadn't

sued under the Freedom of Information Act. I guess what I'm saying is you get him here, then the rest is up to that. Most of those people are coming on temporary visas. My daughter is scheduled to have a C section. I really want to be there for her.

Someone's getting married, someone is dying, someone there's an event, um not people who are want to immigrate to the United States, and most of them are trying to visit family because from these seven countries, like, we're not giving out a lot of tourist visas for you manis to come go to Disneyland and so so most of of visas that we're giving out, it's because you have a really compelling reason to come and some tie to the US because our our visa program like was not free

of sort of racial or national origin profiling before this, right Like Irab has a Syrian staffer and we've been applying for a visa for her to come to New York for our all staff retreat like since the Obama administration, and we can't get one for her. Why do you think because they don't believe that you could be Syrian and not intend to immigrate. The State Department, yes, and the various other you know, you come out the other end of this experience of the two thousand seventeen UM

airport weekend. Airport, that's what I called. My mom called you Chase in airport weekends. He doesn't get to be in it. Rogan could definitely play me. So you you have airport weekend and you come out the other end of that, and you you realize things have changed for you. Do you feel that they change for you personally in your in your career, your arc? I mean I I don't maybe. I mean my mom called me on Sunday and I was going into day three of no sleep, and she was like, how are you doing? And I

was like, Mom, I'm living the first line of my obituary. UM. But I said it more for like shock value then because I actually believed it, and in retrospect it might have been true. Um. I just wasn't thinking about it in that way. Like we came out with a ton of lawsuits on our hands and you filed right. So the travel band came down. It was signed at four thirty pm on Friday, and we were tracking people coming in.

So we had clients who are coming in and one of them was a man named Hamid Darwish who had worked for us Forces in a rock on a Ford Operating base for ten and a half years, which is relevant for a number of reasons, one of which is that to work on a on a FOB you need to get a military grade level security clearance every six months. So Hamid had had twenty one military grade level security checks. There had been multiple attempts on his life, he had

young kids. Um, he was given this visa through a program that Senators Kane and Kennedy had created in Congress to try to protect those who would put their lives on the line to assist our military, which I think if we don't implement well, we're going to have trouble

finding allies in the future. And he showed up here and he was handcuffed and locked in a room, and they let out his wife and kids and they came out crying and they we have their lawyer and their law students waiting for them, and they said, you know, Hamid is locked in a room and there's a bunch of other people in the room with them, and we

don't know what to do. So Um, I called a friend of mine from law school, and because I'm not a litigator, and I was like, what do we file um, and he was like, we need to file a habeas petition. Habeas corpus literally means like produced the body. Yeah, it's it's it's what says that you get like some amount of trial if you're held in Guantanamo, Like the US can't turn airports into a black site and detain anyone from a Muslim country who looks brown. You have to

have a hearing in front of a judge. And so my friend Justin Cox said, you know, we should file a habeas corpus lawsuit, which was brilliant it and now he works for I WRAP, which only took me like a year and a half to effectually. Then we called our former mentor from me A law school, Mike Wishney, who said, let's make it a class action, which meant like, let's file a habeas petition on behalf of anyone who might be detained by the government anywhere in the country.

And then we looped in the Immigrants Rights Project, the a c l U, the National Immigration Law Center, and then everyone stayed up all night so that we could get the thing drafted, it on file by five o'clock in the morning, because we wanted it filed before any international flights could take off because we didn't want them

to be able to deport anybody. And we were granted a hearing that night in Brooklyn at seven thirty and legal learned from the a c l U argued it and Lee is like a ringer, just like if you ever have an argument about due process and immigration and you can get Lee to argue it for you, like you should. You should definitely do that. Uh. You should make sure he's sober um, but if he's not, he'll

still win. He's well, we called him, We literally called him, and we were like, Lee, what are you doing right now? He's like, I'm in a bar. What's going on? We're like, we need you to go to Brooklyn and argue this case right there. And he won. Uh, and so we want to eat thirty and the judge said everyone has to be released. And the Customs and Border Protection officials of the airport didn't believe us that we had won

this court decision. So Omar Jodwat from the a c l U tweeted out a picture of the court order. So you had lawyers at airports all over the country, like running around showing customs officials the photo of Omer's Twitter feed on their phones and they obeyed that Twitter post. At JFK, we literally got a plane turned around on the runway and they were trying to deport an Irani

and Fulbright student to Ukraine of all places. And she was on the plane and she was on the phone with us, and we were trying to decide, like should we have her stand up and make a fuss and get thrown off the plane? And then we're like, no, we shouldn't do that because she'll lose her visa if she does that. Like, yeah, but when you get the woman off the plane, when you argue the case and you win the case and he gets off the bar stool and you have the Twitter picture, there's like a

great movie. Do you ever meet some of these people whose lives you've affected, our lives you've changed, Oh, for sure. And I'm still in touch with some of them, and we you know, when we have events, we try to have clients come speak at the events because I think it's really important that we're not speaking for people. But we also have a lot of clients who don't want to stay in touch. You know. I think a typical symptom of of going through something really traumatic is to

want to just like put it all behind you. And we're very tied up in that trauma, like where what happened before? Right, and once you're here, you don't want to deal with what happened before. Um, So some people want to stay in touch and some people don't. And I you know, I don't force it. Well even for people who the immigration issue is uh, some of that's not in the forefront. The number one issue is the economy and their paychecks. The number two is healthcare. That

this ripping children away from their parents changed everything. I mean, this becomes the image of the most heinous. What was your response to that? I mean, I think your organization have any role in that. We actually want a big lawsuit on behalf of two thousand, seven hundred unaccompanied kids in Central America who are trying to reunite with a parent in the United States. But you know, we don't

have offices on the border. I mean, I took a lot of hope from that, actually, which I know is strange, but I think this is the bottom that we hit. We made at the bottom, right, it didn't go further. You know. The thing that was amazing about airport weekend. Is that like we organized the lawyers, but nobody organized the protesters. Totally spontaneous, thousands of Americans went out and freezing shitty January weather to just be like this is

not cool. The executive order was rescinded before the lawsuit. The lawsuit we once said that they can't hold people. But the one that we won right away wasn't about sort of the legality of the order on its face. It was the public pressure that got the administration to rescind the executive order and the so called like chaos at the airports, which I will forever be proud of. And I the same thing happened with the family separation policy on the border. There were plenty of lawsuits about it,

you know the lawsuits. Ultimately we're victorious. Congress like fucked around. It didn't end up doing anything. Um what got it to stop was just like the number of people who who stood up and said like this is not okay, the number of journalists who refused to stop reporting on it. Ultimately, it was just straight up public pressure that caused the administration to rescind the policy. And it hasn't been totally rescinded. Right,

they're still separating kids from families. Like, it's not a perfect solution, but as you watch, like so many of the sort of systems to protect democracy and the rule of law be dismantled, it does give me hope that when something that agreed just happens, people are still willing to stand up and say like, this is an American and that when they do, it means something. Um in your mind, I'm assuming that you're capable of citing a

couple examples if you're willing. Are there any heroes in the Senator of the House on this issue who you think get it right about this issue? Senator McCain was amazing on this issue. He was amazing on refugee issues. Why do you think that is? Because I think if you have served in the military overseas, you understand how important it is for our foreign policy to have a

humanitarian component. You understand that if the US wants to be taken seriously as an enforcer of national security, that that can't just be a stick, that that it needs to have a carrot. Also, that we need to take responsibility for sort of the peaceful side of national security issues. And I think he understood that deeply. Senator Shaheen has been great for us on these issues. Um, I'm looking forward to, you know, the new Senate and the new

House and seeing what we can do with them. And I hope that I hope that there are more heroes of the six and a half million that comprises your current budget or roughly, that most of that money comes from where it's individuals, foundations and corporate We do not take government funding. Describe your relationship with the promptin's substitute grandparents. Really. Yeah,

I have been very generous too. I mean they're just lovely, Like Charles is just hilarious and sassy and has me to his house and it is just like really supportive and support Yeah, but they've become family. And I don't know as media and savvy with social media at all important to you or not it is important. I think it's tricky right now because I think earned media doesn't have the impact that it did a couple of years ago.

I think, um, there's so much crazy stuff happening all the time that you just when you get a story in the New York Times, it just doesn't mean what it used to mean, and it doesn't stick the way you used to stick. And you also you have an administration that doesn't care when The New York Times says something. One thing that I've become really interested in and I have a project that I've been working on for a while,

UM is sort of using popular culture. UM, and how can you sort of you know, like people maybe won't read New York Times articles or won't register them, but like they'll binge watch for fourteen hours like the newest season of whatever. UM Sola Mirror. Yeah, I can't watch

Black Mirror because it freaks me out too much. But you know, But so if you can get like a narrative about a more positive or more useful narrative about immigrants or refugees into a pop culture format, I think that has a lot of promises, a way to try to you know, change hearts in minds. What's next for you book? No, you're not interested in that. You have time to reflect. I reflect in a very like neurotic, anxious, obsessive way that does not lend itself well to like

overarching narrative. But I think with people like you get things done. Yeah. I got some offers to write books, and I was like, well, when you know so and so activists wrote a book like how did they do it? And they're like, oh, they took book leaf And I was like, that's the last thing I'm gonna do right now. Let's just be like, oh, well, I mean, I think attention to any issue ebbs and flows, right. Like, we

definitely had our fifteen minutes around airport weekend. We were aware at the time time that it was fifteen minutes, and so we approached it really strategically and said, you know, what can we keep from this, Like what can we hang on to that we can continue to use in the future. And and I'm continuing to sort of take that approach of just you know, with the MacArthur like that's amazing. I feel like it adds a lot of pressure on me to make sure I'm leveraging it for

the work as much as possible. Pay yourself very much money. Well now I don't have to, thankfully, thanks MacArthur. No I I do, okay, it's not like thirty rock money.

Um No. I want to keep fighting this fight. I have a ton of ideas for what should be next, and the other staff at Arabe has a bunch of ideas, and we've got you know, two years ago we were a two million dollar organization, So we've grown pretty fast, and we're trying to manage that growth in a way where the you know, quality of our work is still high, in our organizational culture is still good, but also we're

aggressively growing to fight these problems. And you know, so like where is like if Hillary had been elected, we would be making a big play around climate refugees because to me, that's like the single biggest thing that we have to contend with, right Like, the first major manifestation of climate change is going to be and is already like the displacement of large numbers of people, and we have no no legal or systematic regime whatsoever to deal

with that anywhere. I think I work a little better in a bunker mentality, Like getting back to your press, I don't like pressure, but I've I've process resistance is you know, creative resistance is a better fit for me than like scaling up widgets. You're one of those people who are like, you know, where would the world be

without you? I mean that quieter that was tireless refugee activist and could have been stand up comic Becca Heller her organization once again is the International Refugee Assistance Project at Refugee rights dot org. I'm a like Baldwin and you're listening to here's the Thing and