Trump Signed the Muslim Ban on Day 7. People Were Detained at Airports. Lawyers Camped in Terminals. Courts Blocked It Repeatedly.

The first executive order was signed on a Friday evening, effective immediately — with no coordination with CBP, the State Department, or airlines. People who were already in the air, holding valid US visas, landed to find themselves detained. Green card holders — legal permanent residents of the United States — were held and questioned. Travelers from Iran, Iraq, Libya, Somalia, Sudan, Syria, and Yemen were affected, regardless of the purpose of their travel, their immigration status, or how long they had legally resided in the United States. The administration initially stated it applied to green card holders, then backtracked, then reversed course multiple times in a single weekend.

Within 48 hours, lawyers from the ACLU, the National Immigration Law Center, and dozens of law firms were working pro bono in airport terminals across the country — Dulles, JFK, LAX, O'Hare — filing emergency habeas petitions to free detained travelers. A federal judge in New York, Ann Donnelly, issued a nationwide emergency stay of the deportation order within 24 hours of signing. Additional courts issued their own stays. Protests erupted at airports across the country — tens of thousands of people gathered spontaneously at terminals. The acting Attorney General, Sally Yates, ordered the Justice Department not to defend the order in court; Trump fired her the same night.

The administration issued revised versions of the ban — EO 13780 in March 2017 and a proclamation in September 2017 — trying to survive court scrutiny. All versions were challenged. The Supreme Court, in Trump v. Hawaii (2018), upheld the third version 5-4, with Chief Justice Roberts writing the majority opinion. Justice Sotomayor's dissent cited Korematsu — the World War II Japanese-American internment case — as a comparable low point in American civil rights history.