I'm Lee Rowland, and this is At Liberty from the ACLU, the podcast that explores the biggest civil rights and civil liberties issues of our day.

In the past few weeks, the treatment of immigrant families at the U.S. border has dominated the public conversation.

Under a new zero-tolerance policy, the government has arrested thousands of people crossing the U.S. border, including those seeking asylum, and separated them from their children.

In response to national outrage, the president signed an executive order supposedly ending family separation. We are taping this episode on Wednesday, June 27th, and on Tuesday,

yesterday, there were two major court decisions. First, the Supreme Court upheld President Trump's travel ban against people from certain

Muslim countries.

And late last night, a federal court in California issued a ruling in a case brought by the

ACLU, ordering the government to immediately reunite families currently separated by the

government.

Today we have with us, Lee Learned. Lee is lead counsel in this case called Mrs. L. versus ICE.

It's a constitutional challenge to the government's practice of separating immigrant families at the border that was filed earlier this year.

Lee's also the deputy director of the ACLU's Immigrants Rights Project. He's worked on immigration and national security issues at the ACLU since 1992. He's here to help us explain this court decision and what's next for families at the border. Lee, thank you so much for being. Thanks for having me. Especially on what I assume is about four and a half minutes of sleep.

Right.

Well, we know you run well on fumes. So thanks. Let's start with the ruling that you got in the family separation lawsuit last night. Tell us about it. Yeah, it's an enormous victory, a complete victory. Every child has been separated and now we think there's in excess of 2,000 kids.

Kids as young as one years old, two years old have to be reunited within 30 days. And if you're

under five, within 14 days and every parent needs to be able to speak to their child within 10 days,

you'd think that every parent would know where their child's being held. They don't, so we even had to ask for that and no more separations going forward.

Notwithstanding President Trump's executive order, we believe that separations will continue.

We ask the judge to stop separations going forward and to reunite these kids.

It's just been going on too long.

The harm is becoming devastating on the

ground, and we are so thankful the judge said, I'm going to help these kids and set hard

...