Lucy Gellman Photo
Rosen at WNHH.
As the Trump administration prepares to take office, David Rosen, a longtime New Haven civil rights attorney, and fellow lawyers are preparing to tackle new areas of law in order to protect people who may need them.
“We are all immigration lawyers, now,” Rosen said quoting a colleague responding to comments by president-elect Trump that he plans to round up and deport undocumented immigrants and penalize “sanctuary cities” like New Haven. Trump will have broad presidential powers to crack down on those cities, USA Today wrote this week.
Rosen, who has long fought for social justice as well as for individual rights, said he and his colleagues are prepared to mount legal challenges should New Haven be threatened as a result.
Trump may decide to penalize sanctuary cities by trying to strip them of federal funding, but Rosen observed during an interview on the “Legal Eagle” show on WNHH radio that the U.S. Supreme Court has spoken on this issue, holding that states are separate from the federal government. “They are separate, sovereign, and independent,” Rosen observed, adding one of those U.S. Supreme Court decisions was written by the late Antonin Scalia.
He reminded Legal Eagle listeners of the 10th Amendment. “The powers not delegated to the United States by the Constitution, nor prohibited by it to the States, are reserved to the States respectively, or to the people.”
Paul Bass Photo
Rosen announcing a class-action lawsuit against the owners of Church Street South.
From the viewpoint of New Haven and its court system, Rosen said, “There is legal protection against the degradation threatened by the incoming administration.” He said “our system of federalism restricts the power of the national government over states, including Connecticut’s state courts, including the state supreme court.” Giving authority to the states was pushed for decades by the political right. There is “more than a little irony here,” Rosen said, observing what the right pushed so hard to achieve will now be useful to the left.
Rosen, who recently helped convince a state judge to order an overhaul of Connecticut’s public school system, a case now on appeal to the state Supreme Court, said the state’s courts will play a strong role in preserving protection for immigrants.
Asked how the bar was taking what might be a new world order, he said, in “conversation with friends, family and colleagues, the tone or theme I would say is ‘oy veh.’ This is bad. It is going to be bad.” But he and his colleagues are poised to jump in when events demand it.
To listen to Rosen’s full interview, which includes other topics as well as Trump, click on or download the above audio file.
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Speaking of irony, the Obama administration which professed to welcome all immigrants documented or not, has shut down "wet foot, dry foot", which ostensibly condemns Cuban refugees to a Cuban jail or worse if caught in the U.S. undocumented. Where is the outrage from the Left on this one? Silence is complicity.