Naureen Shah, ACLU immigration director: ‘This administration’s politics of hate do not represent the views of Americans’

For months, Naureen Shah has been working at a frenetic pace. As director of Government Affairs for the Equality Division of the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU), she leads the organization’s advocacy efforts on behalf of migrants’ rights. Since Donald Trump returned to the White House in January 2025, the ACLU has launched 313 legal actions and filed 191 lawsuits challenging policies introduced by his administration.

Previously, the human rights lawyer directed Amnesty International USA’s advocacy campaigns and served as interim director of the Human Rights Institute at Columbia Law School. The daughter of immigrants — “my father arrived 55 years ago on the Fourth of July with a small suitcase and $12 in his pocket” — Shah has advocated for human rights before Congress, the White House, federal agencies, the United Nations, the European Union, foreign governments and other regional bodies.

On the domestic front, the ACLU recently secured a major victory at the Supreme Court when it succeeded in blocking Trump’s attempt to end birthright citizenship.

Question. Three Supreme Court justices voted in favor of the president’s proposal. What would have been the consequences of a ruling upholding the executive order that eliminated birthright citizenship?

Answer. Ending birthright citizenship would have upended the law, as well as the lives of hundreds of thousands of families. First and foremost, it would have created a permanent subclass of people born in the United States who are denied their rights as American citizens. It would have invited confusion, division, and instability into communities across the country. Schools, hospitals, state agencies, and local governments would have been forced to navigate a system that treats some American-born children as belonging and others as suspect.

Q. The United States has always been a nation of immigrants. Do you still believe it can be said that the country welcomes them?

A. This country has long been welcoming of the stranger, and even now polls show that people are very much in favor of the majority of their neighbors and community members having a path to citizenship. People believe that we need to build a working immigration system where everybody who wants to follow the rules can do so. Overwhelming numbers believe that the people who came here as children — the Dreamers — should have a path to citizenship. The politics of hate that have been used by this administration do not represent the views of Americans. We’re in a really dark moment, but that moment doesn’t reflect the entire trajectory of this nation.

Q. Compared with previous administrations, is this the one that has pursued the most aggressive immigration policy?

A. There have been periods of deep racism and xenophobia in the past, but in the modern era this is the deepest and most explicit period of racist immigration policy. Ronald Reagan was a polarizing president, but he embraced the idea that the U.S. was a nation of immigrants. His administration enacted the last major path to citizenship legalization program. For decades, we had bipartisan support for updating the immigration system in recognition of the contribution of immigrants. When Trump first ran for president, it was politically useful for him to harness hatred to pit citizens against their neighbors, turning asylum seekers — people running for their lives and seeking a better future — into the boogeyman. That hatred has now become federal policy and is devastating thousands of lives.

Q. The president has signed almost 200 immigration executive orders. Which of the measures approved during his term do you consider the most harmful?

A. They approved $240 billion to build a massive deportation policing force that not only includes federal law enforcement but also state and local and potentially even military personnel. That affects everyone, who now live in a far more of a police state than before. It also allows them to change the immigration system without passing a law that grants them legal authority.

Q. How do operations targeting migrants affect U.S. citizens?

A. Depending on where you work, the language you speak or whether you speak with an accent — and, certainly, the color of your skin — you could become the victim of this massive deportation force that treats people like they don’t have any rights. Even citizens can be beaten and killed with impunity; so it affects all of us. It also affects U.S. children: one in four lives with an immigrant. That means one in four children fears that when their parents leave for work, they may not return home. How can we expect children to learn and thrive if they live in fear of losing a parent?

Q. The conservative-majority Supreme Court has authorized the use of racial profiling to detain migrants…

A. Yes, but racial discrimination remains unconstitutional, and we continue to bring lawsuits across the country. We are challenging ICE’s warrantless arrests in Illinois, North Carolina, Colorado and countless other places; we will not let these things go uncontested. There are ideologues in the Trump administration bent on deporting 100 million people — roughly a third of the country’s population; they want to remake the United States in the image of their white supremacist fantasy. Yet, millions of people have joined demonstrations and urged their city legislature and governors to act.

Q. ICE has operated for more than two decades. What has changed in the public’s interactions with this immigration agency?

A. In the past, if you encountered ICE and were undocumented, you might have been asked to report for a check-in, you might have been detained for a few weeks but then released. Now we are in a period when, if you encounter ICE and don’t have legal status or cannot prove it, you could be detained and not released. You could be deported within days, so your ability to make plans for your child — who will have custody, whether they come with you or not — is severely compromised. This is breaking families apart and leaving children alone and vulnerable in ways we have never seen.

Q. The ACLU is involved in many of the legal challenges to the executive orders that have been issued. Rulings are coming from trial courts, appeals courts, the Supreme Court… What have the last few months been like for someone like you, deeply engaged in the defense of human rights?

A. It has been a heartbreaking period since the inauguration. We prepared for the mass-deportation promises to be fulfilled, but as prepared as we were — in the birthright citizenship case we filed the lawsuit two hours after the executive order was issued — what we saw in Minneapolis and the killings of Renée Good and Alex Pretty was shattering. I have young kids, and I think about how they will grow up, and whether they will have the same confidence in their full rights and equal protection under the law that I had. I worry about my kids, who are grandchildren of immigrants. I worry about those hundreds of thousands of people who are American in every way except on paper and who have just no ability to get legal status because of how awful this administration is. I worry about many people, and that is what keeps me going.

Q. The government has targeted one of the humanitarian programs most widely used by those fleeing critical situations: Temporary Protected Status (TPS). The Supreme Court recently terminated it for Haitians and Syrians. What consequences will this have?

A. It means Congress must act to protect TPS holders. If it does not, people who have lived here for years — working, raising their children and caring for aging U.S. citizens — will lose their legal status virtually overnight with no path for appeal. Many will face an impossible choice: stay and risk detention and removal, or return to countries, some of which the State Department itself lists as too dangerous to visit. Mixed-status families — with U.S. citizen children and TPS-holder parents — will be torn apart.

Q. For the first time last year, more migrants left the country than arrived. What consequences could a decline in the immigrant population have?

A. It will be devastating economically, and there are forecasts of the pain U.S. households will have to endure. Grocery prices going up, fewer houses being built, fewer people able to get care workers to support their aging parents, fewer people in rural areas able to have doctors and nurses and other healthcare professionals to provide them life-saving assistance. This country needs immigrants and noncitizens, and if they have to live in fear, it will hurt us all.

Q. Trump has offered asylum to white South Africans while denying it to citizens of other countries. How do you interpret this?

A. It is a white supremacist policy and a complete inversion of what the refugee program is intended to do, which is to provide safe refuge to people fleeing violence and persecution regardless of their race. It makes a mockery of this nation’s history as a leader in refugee protection worldwide.

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