Since 2017, the Trump administration has produced no significant legal initiative to deal with the rights of asylum seekers, but it has reinterpreted existing law aggressively with the objective of separating family, holding asylum seekers in prolonged internment in camps near the border, and excluding those who seek to come. These steps entail sweeping violations of US law and international human rights agreements many of which were initiated by the United States.

Join Scott Horton for Refugee Rights in the Age of Trump at 10:30 a.m. March 1. Scott is a contributing editor at Harper’s Magazine, where he covers legal and national security issues, an adjunct professor at Columbia Law School and counsel at the law firm of DLA Piper. A life-long human rights advocate, Scott served as counsel to Andrei Sakharov and Elena Bonner and a number of other human rights and democracy advocates in the former Soviet Union. He is a director of the Moscow-based Andrei Sakharov Foundation and was a founding trustee of the American University in Central Asia. He has also worked extensively with the Association of the Bar of the City of New York, chairing three committees and helping to direct major research projects dealing with U.S. government interrogation practices in the war on terror and the practice of extraordinary renditions. Scott has regularly appeared before Congress, most recently testifying before the House Judiciary, House Oversight and Senate Armed Services Committees on questions relating to the accountability of military contractors and the Justice Department’s uneven management of public integrity matters. On behalf of Human Rights First he supervised the production of a study of accountability for private security contractors in the War on Terror entitled Private Security Contractors at War: Ending a Culture of Impunity. He is a member of the Council on Foreign Relations and a member of the board of NYU’s Center on Law and Security, the National Institute of Military Justice, the EurasiaGroup and the American Branch of the International Law Association. Scott’s writing for Harper’s Magazine received the National Magazine Award for Excellence in Reporting (“Ellie”) in 2011. His writing for Foreign Policy on the deterioration of U.S.-Pakistani relations was also cited as best long-form journalism in war reporting for 2011. He has worked closely with CBS, ABC, the Associated Press, MSNBC, NPR, Russian Television and the BBC on legal affairs reporting.