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Lawyers played a key role in challenging the Trump administration’s Travel Ban on entry into the United States of nationals from various majority-Muslim nations. Responding to calls from nongovernmental organizations (NGOs), which were amplified by social media, lawyers responded to the Travel Ban’s chaotic rollout by providing assistance to foreign travelers at airports. Their efforts led to initial court victories, which in turn led the government to soften the Ban somewhat in two superseding executive actions. The lawyers’ work also contributed to the broader resistance to the Trump administration by dramatizing its bigotry, callousness, cruelty, and lawlessness. The efficacy of the lawyers’ resistance to the Travel Ban shows that, contrary to strong claims about the limits of court action, litigation can promote social change. General lessons about lawyer activism in ordinary times are difficult to draw, however, because of the extraordinary threat Trump poses to civil rights and the rule of law.

This chapter illustrates how the counterstrategies of rope-a-dope and transnational legal process have played out since the start of the Trump Administration. The outside strategy of domestic litigation has been combined with other forms of external and internal pressure from many stakeholders in a wideranging effort to resist President Donald Trump’s draconian immigration policies, particularly the Travel Ban, or Muslim Ban. The chapter also describes the core strategy of internalized bureaucratic resistance to efforts to reimpose torture as an “enhanced interrogation tactic.” This counterstrategy, which gives meaning to the slogan “This is what democracy looks like,” will likely continue whether or not the Trump Administration successfully defends its immigration policies in the courts.

This chapter explores the challenges of teaching and practicing immigration and civil rights law under the crisis conditions of the Donald Trump administration. Drawing on our experiences as professors engaged in clinical legal education, we examine two matters in which the law clinic we teach has been involved: the first legal challenge to the original Muslim Travel Ban; and the intensive initial days of representation of an individual immigrant who sought sanctuary from deportation. We highlight these two cases in order to demonstrate the different forms that crisis lawyering in the same practice area can take—from a class-action lawsuit challenging national policy, to the multipronged defense of a local resident—and the commonalities that exist across them. In so doing, we aspire to give further definition to what constitutes “crisis lawyering” and to reflect on lessons that may be useful not only for lawyers or clinical teachers but also for other fields.