Former acting Attorney General Sally Yates on Thursday described the circumstances in which she was fired by President Trump for refusing to enforce his controversial travel ban as “an unexpected moment when the law and conscience intersected.”
“Defending the constitutionality of the travel ban would require the Department of Justice to argue that the executive order had nothing to do with religion, that it was not intended to disfavor Muslims,” Yates said while speaking at Harvard Law School’s Class Day ceremony, “despite the numerous prior statements that had been made by the president and his surrogates regarding his intent to effectuate a Muslim ban.”
Yates said she struggled with her decision, taking several days to decide whether or not to resign.
{mosads}“I believed then and I believe now that resigning would have protected my personal integrity, but it would not have protected the integrity of the Department of Justice,” Yates said.
Yates said her opposition to defending the ban was rooted in knowledge that it “wasn’t just any legal issues, it was about the core founding principle of religious freedom.”
“I couldn’t in good conscience send [Department of Justice] lawyers into court to advance an argument that the travel ban was unrelated to religion when the evidence of intent reflected that that was not the case,” she said.
Her comments came the same day that a federal appeals court refused to reinstate the travel ban in a major blow to the Trump administration. The 4th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals ruled 10-3 that the order “speaks with vague words of national security, but in context drips with religious intolerance, animus and discrimination.”
Yates told the New Yorker earlier this week that the Justice Department wasn’t given any advance notice that the ban would be enacted and that Justice lawyers who examined the ban were ordered not to discuss it with Yates.
Earlier this month, she testified in front of the Senate Judiciary Committee, telling lawmakers that she refused to enforce the ban because it was unlawful.
“In looking at what the intent was of the executive order — which was derived in part of an analysis of facts outside of the face of the order — that is part of what led to our conclusion that it was not lawful,” Yates said at the time.