I will never forget, I think she was an Iranian woman when she heard I was the attorney general pushed her way through the crowd, grabbed me by the code and said, please help me, they have my five year old son and won't tell me anything.

I think when the Trump administration, the solicitor general's office stands up next week and says, you know, you should trust the executive and the courts have no role to play.

That argument is going to have a lot less credibility now than it would have had a few months ago.

Hi and welcome to Amicus. I'm Dalia Wittwig. I cover the courts and the law for slate.

So this week was an off week at the US Supreme Court as Donald Trump's nominee for the year old vacancy at the High Court made the rounds on Capitol Hill for his courtesy meetings.

But next week the justices will be back in the saddle and among the cases they're going to hear is one that touches on immigration and border patrol and the rights of foreigners inside the United States, all things with incredible resonance today.

Later on in the show we're going to speak to one of the lawyers involved in that case, but first we're going to turn to the continuing legal fallout from President Donald Trump's executive order on immigration from just a few weeks back.

Well, this week a federal judge in Virginia issued a preliminary injunction against that travel ban. This of course comes on the heels of the recent decision from the ninth circuit blocking implementation of Trump's new rules.

But this Virginia lawsuit was actually filed before the Washington State lawsuit and it stems from the case of the Aziz brothers, the two Yemenis whose deportation back to Djibouti, we talked about on this podcast only two weeks ago.

In the Virginia order from this week the judge went further than the Seattle and ninth circuit judges and got to the constitutional merits of the case, finding that the ban was at least in part animated by religious prejudice toward Muslims.

You may remember that the Commonwealth of Virginia itself joined on to the suit arguing that the ban would impact public colleges and universities in the state.

Virginia Attorney General Mark Herring has been at the helm of this effort. He scored a big win this week and he joins me now to explain what's going on with this suit.

So Mr Attorney General welcome to Annicus.

Well, thank you very much for having me. This is the first podcast I've done before, so I'm really excited.

Well, we're thrilled to have you and I feel like Virginia got a tiny bit ripped off because the Seattle lawsuit got a lot of the ink in the publicity.

But the Virginia suit was actually pretty amazing and the win in Judge Brinkham's court on Monday went much further actually than the Seattle order.

Can you talk a little bit about what Judge Brinkham did on Monday and why it's actually very significant going forward?

Well, it was extraordinary.

The Ninth Circuit case talked and focused primarily on procedural due process and Judge Brinkham really got to the heart of the religious discrimination piece of it.

And in doing that, it does a couple of things.

First, it goes to the very validity of the order regardless as to who was affected or impacted.

So procedural due process, different visa holders, different green card holders may have different due process rights.

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