Donald Trump fires acting US attorney general Sally Yates after she refuses to enforce immigration order

US President Donald Trump fired the federal government’s top lawyer Sally Yates on Monday after she took the extraordinarily rare step of defying the White House and saying the Justice Department would not defend his new travel restrictions targeting seven Muslim-majority nations. Yates’ refusal to defend the executive order was largely symbolic given that Sen. Jeff Sessions, Trump’s pick for attorney general, will almost certainly defend the policy once he’s sworn in. Sessions faces a vote early Tuesday in the Senate Judiciary Committee and must then be confirmed by the full Senate before taking office. She said in a memo Monday she was not convinced it was lawful or consistent with the agency’s obligation “to stand for what is right.”

Trump’s press secretary, Sean Spicer, soon followed with a statement accusing Yates of having “betrayed the Department of Justice by refusing to enforce a legal order designed to protect the citizens of the United States.” Trump named longtime federal prosecutor Dana Boente, the U.S. attorney for the Eastern District of Virginia, as Yates’ replacement. The chain of events bore echoes of the Nixon-era “Saturday Night Massacre,” when the attorney general and deputy attorney general resigned rather than follow an order to fire a special prosecutor investigating the Watergate scandal. Lee Gelernt, deputy director of the ACLU’s Immigrants’ Rights Project, who worked on one of the legal challenges, said, “It sends a very strong message that there’s something very wrong with the Muslim ban.”

Just days after stepping down from office, former president Barack Obama weighed in through a spokesman, seeming to back those demonstrating against Trump’s decree and declaring his opposition to “discriminating against individuals because of their faith or religion.”

Obama said that he was “heartened by the level of engagement taking place in communities around the country” – an apparent reference to protests at airports nationwide. Trump’s order pauses America’s entire refugee program for four months, indefinitely bans all those from war-ravaged Syria and temporarily freezes immigration from Iraq, Syria, Iran, Sudan, Libya, Somalia and Yemen. President Donald Trump fired acting Attorney General Sally Yates Monday night, hours after she ordered Justice Department lawyers to stop defending his executive order barring travel from seven Muslim-majority countries, according to a White House statement.
Sally Yates, the acting Attorney General of the United States, is fired after ordering employees of the United States Department of Justice not to enforce the President's ban due to personal doubts over its legality. Dana J. Boente becomes the new acting attorney general.