Lee Gelernt is a lawyer at the ACLU’s national office in New York. He is widely recognized as one of the country’s leading public interest lawyers and has argued dozens of important civil rights cases during his career, including in the U.S. Supreme Court and virtually every federal court of appeals in the country. He has also testified as a legal expert before both houses of Congress. His recent work is featured in the documentary “The Fight.” In addition to his work at the ACLU, he is an adjunct professor at Columbia Law School, and for several years was a visiting professor at Yale Law School.

During the past four years, he has argued some of the country’s highest profile cases, including:

A national class-action challenge to the Trump administration’s unprecedented practice of separating immigrant families at the border. In 2018, a federal court issued an injunction in Ms. L. v. ICE holding the practice unconstitutional and requiring the administration to reunite the thousands of separated families, which included babies and toddlers. Lee’s work on this case is featured in the 2020 documentary film “The Fight” and in a July 2018 New York Times Magazine cover story about the ACLU.

Successful challenges in the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals to the Trump administration’s first and second asylum bans.

The first case challenging the president’s travel ban on individuals from certain Muslim-majority nations, which resulted in a federal court in Brooklyn issuing a nationwide Saturday night injunction against the ban only one day after the president enacted it.

A class-action challenge to the Trump administration’s use of the Title 42 public health laws to summarily expel unaccompanied migrant children without an asylum hearing, based on the claim that the policy was necessary because of COVID-19.

Successfully arguing Rodriguez v. Swartz in the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals, involving the fatal cross-border shooting of a Mexican teenager in Mexico by a U.S. border patrol officer firing from U.S. soil. The appeals court ruling in favor of the boy’s family was the first-ever federal court decision to hold that the Fourth Amendment’s prohibition against the use of excessive force by law enforcement applies extraterritorially. The case was the subject of a cover story in the Sunday New York Times Magazine.

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