Brene Brown
Appearances
Criminal
The Mirage
Hi, everyone. I'm Brene Brown, and I'd love to tell you about a new series that's launching on Unlocking Us. I'm calling it the On My Heart and Mind podcast series. It's going to include conversations with some of my favorite writers on topics ranging from revolutionary love and gun ownership to menopause and finding joy in grief.
Criminal
The Mirage
The first episode is available now, and I can't wait for you to hear it. All new episodes will drop on Wednesdays, and you can get them as soon as they're out by following Unlocking Us on Apple or wherever you listen to your podcasts.
Criminal
A Murder in the Forest
Hi, everyone. I'm Brene Brown, and I'd love to tell you about a new series that's launching on Unlocking Us. I'm calling it the On My Heart and Mind podcast series. It's going to include conversations with some of my favorite writers on topics ranging from revolutionary love and gun ownership to menopause and finding joy in grief.
Criminal
A Murder in the Forest
The first episode is available now, and I can't wait for you to hear it. All new episodes will drop on Wednesdays, and you can get them as soon as they're out by following Unlocking Us on Apple or wherever you listen to your podcasts.
Criminal
Into the Vault
Hi, everyone. I'm Brene Brown, and I'd love to tell you about a new series that's launching on Unlocking Us. I'm calling it the On My Heart and Mind podcast series. It's going to include conversations with some of my favorite writers on topics ranging from revolutionary love and gun ownership to menopause and finding joy in grief.
Criminal
Into the Vault
The first episode is available now, and I can't wait for you to hear it. All new episodes will drop on Wednesdays, and you can get them as soon as they're out by following Unlocking Us on Apple or wherever you listen to your podcasts.
Criminal
The Petition
Hi, everyone. I'm Brene Brown, and I'd love to tell you about a new series that's launching on Unlocking Us. I'm calling it the On My Heart and Mind podcast series. It's going to include conversations with some of my favorite writers on topics ranging from revolutionary love and gun ownership to menopause and finding joy in grief.
Criminal
The Petition
The first episode is available now, and I can't wait for you to hear it. All new episodes will drop on Wednesdays, and you can get them as soon as they're out by following Unlocking Us on Apple or wherever you listen to your podcasts.
Criminal
A Land Without Law
I knew two things. There was a song called Guantanamera about the girl from Guantanamo. And I knew the movie A Few Good Men, where Tom Cruise plays a Navy JAG officer defending some people who were charged with executing a Code Red on the Guantanamo Naval Base. That's all I knew.
Criminal
A Land Without Law
When the interviews were going on on boats, they would sometimes last for, we were told, 30 seconds to two minutes. Once they got on shore, the screening interviews stretched out to sometimes 10 or 15 or 20 minutes. But they were being conducted without lawyers for people who couldn't speak English.
Criminal
A Land Without Law
So depending on the kind of question you were asked, you could give an answer that would make sure you got returned to Haiti. So if the question was, are you fleeing from political persecution because you're a member of Lavalas and a supporter of President Aristide, that should be sufficient for you to get an asylum interview. But often they were being asked, do you want a better life in America?
Criminal
A Land Without Law
The answer to that question was also yes, but that could mean that you're an economic migrant, in which case you would simply be returned.
Criminal
A Land Without Law
We learned that they had segregated a group of about 250 Haitians who all had clear asylum claims. They were fleeing from political persecution, but they had also contracted the HIV virus. I thought the US government was out of its mind.
Criminal
A Land Without Law
What kind of public health directive are they considering? You know, to segregate them in a place that was, you know, dirty water, lots of insects under tremendous heat was essentially putting them in life-threatening conditions. Nothing could be more medically dangerous than to put 220 to 250 immunosuppressed people in unsanitary conditions in a prison camp.
Criminal
A Land Without Law
If one person got sick of an infectious disease, everybody would get it. And so that group of people who we called HIV-positives became our most dramatic concern.
Criminal
A Land Without Law
Well, the first argument was that they needed lawyers. I don't know if you've seen the great case Gideon against Wainwright, which is you have a right to a lawyer before you're sentenced to a felony. These people were potentially being sent back to their death, and they didn't have lawyers. So it started as a case about Gideon against Wainwright.
Criminal
A Land Without Law
But then it became a case about the detention of people on Guantanamo. So it became like Korematsu, the Japanese internment case. Can you hold people of color in a detention camp without charging them with any sort of crime?
Criminal
A Land Without Law
You have to go to the clerk's office and put your name on the wheel, which means you get whatever judge is randomly selected. So I was standing there with the opposing counsel from the U.S. attorney's office, and they spun the wheel.
Criminal
A Land Without Law
Every court in the country, every federal court in the country, yeah. Go on the wheel is the term. So they pulled the judge's name out from the available duty judges and said Sterling Johnson Jr.
Criminal
A Land Without Law
And then we went over to the courtroom to wait to go in to see him. And my co-counsel, Michael Ratner, dear friend, looked in and he goes, Harold, he's black. Now, it turned out that he was a Republican. He had been a police officer. But also in his time, he had been a military guard on Guantanamo.
Criminal
A Land Without Law
I could tell he was wary, but interested. And he wasn't buying the government's position, but he wasn't necessarily buying ours either. And no civilian lawyer had been to Guantanamo to that point ever. The government was allowing almost everybody else to go to the island. Filmmakers, piano tuners had been down there, but not lawyers.
Criminal
A Land Without Law
And at one point in the first hearing, they said, we're going to bring out a general so-and-so to testify. And we're going to bring down the Solicitor General of the United States, Ken Starr. And Judge Johnson said, I'm from Bed-Stuy, which essentially meant you can't intimidate me. And then we thought, well, gee, we have a chance.
Criminal
A Land Without Law
He gave us a temporary restraining order, which lasts for 10 days, which meant that we could start to assemble a team to actually go to Guantanamo to meet our clients. And then we had to prepare for a preliminary injunction hearing where we could turn the temporary restraining order into something that would last throughout the trial.
Criminal
A Land Without Law
I checked to see if there was an insurance policy for clinicians at Yale, and there was one for doctors, and it had a million dollar deductible, which meant that we would lose our house. If they prevailed on this motion, we would lose our house. And I went home and I told my wife, I think our house here is at risk.
Criminal
A Land Without Law
And she had been a bankruptcy lawyer, and she said, well, if necessary, we can declare bankruptcy.
Criminal
A Land Without Law
I gathered the students at my house, and I said, if we lose this motion, I lose this house. If we win the motion, it's not frivolous, so we have to win. And I said, give it everything you have, because... This is not just play acting at suing the government anymore. This is for real.
Criminal
A Land Without Law
And I went into the Grand Central Station Hyatt, and I went to the restaurant, which hadn't opened for lunch yet. And I said, do you have a speakerphone here? And they said, yeah, at the Maître d' station. So they set me up. I called the judge. And as I'm arguing, people are coming up and trying to get their table to sit down at the restaurant.
Criminal
A Land Without Law
And I thought I was sort of waving them away, but I didn't want to acknowledge that I was even having these other people around me. Anyway, we won that motion and we won a lot of them. Judge Johnson was more and more sympathetic to us as time went on.
Criminal
A Land Without Law
They developed personal relations with the refugees, many of whom were the same age. They were excited to see that there were young kids in their 20s who were fighting for them. But they also, I think, were a little suspicious. Why are you doing it? What's in it for you? What are your chances of success?
Criminal
A Land Without Law
It took hours to get there because they had to go around Cuban airspace. Anyway, we land, and they took us to this huge aircraft hangar.
Criminal
A Land Without Law
And I gave a speech, and I said, my father was a refugee like you. And people helped him get to America. That's why I'm here. I think they were relieved to see that I was not Caucasian. But I think they weren't quite sure what a Korean American was doing. And there was a moment of indecision about whether they accept our representation.
Criminal
A Land Without Law
And then a guy got up in Creole, Haitian, and he gave a speech. And it turned out what he said is, they're here to help us, and I saw their names in a dream, so we should accept their friendship.
Criminal
A Land Without Law
There was this barbed wire. It was a prison camp. It wasn't a refugee camp. And people were behind the fence. And they had been wearing T-shirts and shorts that they were given by Catholic Relief Services. So they were wearing T-shirts that said things like Miami Dolphins or Miami Heat.
Criminal
A Land Without Law
And when I got out of the car, they all started gathering and moving toward the fence because they had just seen me inside the hangar. And suddenly about four or five of the Haitians ran to the fence and just grabbed the fence, grabbing the barbed wire. And their hands were just bleeding and they were shaking it. And they started screaming, Harold, Harold. And in French, they were saying, free us.
Criminal
A Land Without Law
And the soldiers were so freaked out. They told me to get back in the car. And we drove away, and at this point, all of them are screaming at the top of their lungs, Harold! And for the rest of the time I worked on the case, I would wake up in the middle of the night. And I think if I don't get them out, that's what they'll be shouting when they go back on the boats.
Criminal
A Land Without Law
Well, it taught me what it means to be a lawyer. You take on somebody's representation and they don't have anybody else. And you better give it everything you've got. Because if you don't and you fail, you don't pay the price.
Criminal
A Land Without Law
Normally, a lawsuit gets to the Supreme Court, if at all, once in three to five years. This case went to the Supreme Court five or six times in the first year, and the pace was just insane. I had never argued a case in court before. I probably argued 25 to 30 times in about a year and a half. I probably stayed up all night working on briefs 50 times.
Criminal
A Land Without Law
He basically said, we're not bringing people to Guantanamo anymore. If people come, we'll just pick them up and bring them back.
Criminal
A Land Without Law
Now, you have to remember this was just after the Berlin Wall had been knocked down. This was essentially a floating Berlin Wall. You know, people were trying to flee from persecution, and they were picking them up on boats and bringing them back. It wasn't a humanitarian mission because they could have brought them anywhere else. except Haiti, but they were bringing them back to Haiti.
Criminal
A Land Without Law
And among other things, they were forcing them off the boats with fire hoses. So we called it the Kennebunkport Order because, you know, something issued from someone's vacation home essentially spelled doom for many, many people.
Criminal
A Land Without Law
The government's argument was basically that Guantanamo was land without law, a black hole. Because it was outside the United States, they didn't have to comply with the Constitution.
Criminal
A Land Without Law
So Guantanamo is a very unusual legal entity in that the United States has, since 1903, had a treaty with the Cuban government where the United States has complete jurisdiction and control, that's the term, over the area of Cuba, which is called Guantanamo. Right.
Criminal
A Land Without Law
So we just pointed out that it's essentially an American enclave. The U.S. flag is the only flag that flies there. The only law that applies there is U.S. law. It looks like Middle America, there's a McDonald's, there's a shopping mall. And the only thing that doesn't apply is the US Constitution, according to them, which meant that they could do with these people what they wanted.
Criminal
A Land Without Law
If that were true, they could discriminate against people based on their race. They could prevent them from worshiping the God of their choice. They could force pregnant women to have abortions against their consent. And then we found out that iguanas are protected by U.S. environmental law on Guantanamo. So iguanas have rights but not human beings.
Criminal
A Land Without Law
And then the deputy attorney general called me and said, we will release the 235 HIV-positive Haitians if you agree to vacate the precedent that aliens on Guantanamo have due process rights. And I thought, what if they bring more aliens to Guantanamo in the future? Shouldn't we have this precedent? But then it was pretty clear that this is about the lives of 235 people.
Criminal
A Land Without Law
If we went back to the Supreme Court, we were going to lose the precedent anyway. So we agreed. And they brought them out a couple weeks later on one plane. Harold Coe went to LaGuardia Airport to meet them. We had them being checked in by immigration, and they were wearing bar-coated bracelets like they're a piece of meat in a grocery store.
Criminal
A Land Without Law
And suddenly one of the Haitians comes up to me, and he has a piece of paper on which he's written his name. And he points to the barcoded bracelet. He said, this is not my name. And then he holds up the piece of paper. He said, this is my name. This is my name. And there are a couple of letters off. It was spelled wrong.
Criminal
A Land Without Law
And then I realized the only reason he had a legal right to be in the United States was because of the court order that we had won. And his name is misspelled in the court order. So if we changed his name, he'd have no legal entitlement to be here. So I went back to him and I said, we can't change it. And he said, why not? And I said, well, this is your Ellis Island.
Criminal
A Land Without Law
And then he said, what's your name? And I said, Koh, K-O-H. He said, where'd they give that name to you? And I said, Ellis Island.
Criminal
A Land Without Law
I thought, don't people learn anything? For people who don't think very far ahead, Guantanamo looks like a solution. And then it turns out to be a problem. There is no exit strategy. People who are in a crisis bring people there, and then they can't figure out a way to get them off. Obama said he'd close it within a year.
Criminal
A Land Without Law
Even Trump started to wonder why we had it, and even Bush, who opened it, said it was a mistake. So it is, you know, Obama said in any number of speeches, is this who we are? Is this who we are?
Criminal
A Land Without Law
A number of them went to school in Mattapan, which is a community of color south of Boston. And I remember being at this graduation, and this kid who had come off when he was 12 years old was now 18. And he's wearing his graduation robe, but he's wearing a backward baseball cap instead of a mortarboard. And his pants are down around his thighs. And he sort of swaggers across the stage.
Criminal
A Land Without Law
And the woman sitting next to me said, isn't that awful? What will he become? And I couldn't resist. And I said, lady, I think he's going to be dean of Yale Law School.
Criminal
A Land Without Law
Under U.S. refugee law, you're not supposed to turn people away if they have a well-founded fear of political persecution. But what happened was they were interviewed on the boat, and many of them were simply returned. They never got any closer to the United States. This is Harold Hung-Joo Koh from Yale Law School Studio. I just finished today my 39th year of teaching.
Criminal
A Land Without Law
Hi, everyone. I'm Brene Brown, and I'd love to tell you about a new series that's launching on Unlocking Us. I'm calling it the On My Heart and Mind podcast series. It's going to include conversations with some of my favorite writers on topics ranging from revolutionary love and gun ownership to menopause and finding joy in grief.
Criminal
A Land Without Law
And they asked me whether we would bring a lawsuit against the U.S. government.
Criminal
A Land Without Law
And we thought that was illegal. The question was whether we should file our own lawsuit. In fact, it was kind of crazy to do it. Sue the U.S. government with a bunch of kids, yeah, crazy. Insane. Insane. But they weren't members of the bar. If I didn't file and I didn't sign the pleadings, there was no lawsuit.
Criminal
A Land Without Law
I thought we should at least start drafting papers and see what they look like.
Criminal
A Land Without Law
You know, I had just gotten tenure at Yale Law School, and I thought, you know, I had actually been pretty cautious about the way I lived my life to that point professionally. And I thought, if I'm not ready to take the chance, who will? And I had told the students that they should live up to their principles because my father had been betrayed by people who didn't live up to their principles.
Criminal
A Land Without Law
He was the first Korean from his island, Jeju Island, ever to study law in Seoul, which is an amazing accomplishment. And then the first student from Seoul ever to study law in America.
Criminal
A Land Without Law
The first episode is available now, and I can't wait for you to hear it. All new episodes will drop on Wednesdays, and you can get them as soon as they're out by following Unlocking Us on Apple or wherever you listen to your podcasts.
Criminal
A Land Without Law
But about six months after that, this was in 1960, 61, the government was overthrown by a military coup.
Criminal
A Land Without Law
Sixty people signed the pledge. Within a year or two later, the only one who kept the pledge was my father.
Criminal
A Land Without Law
He said, by the way, what are you doing now that this coup has occurred? And my father said, well, I'm a political exile. I have six children and I'm unemployed. And one week later, my family, six children, parents, each carrying one suitcase, we came to New Haven.
Criminal
A Land Without Law
That's all I thought about. That's not true. I thought about my father. I also thought about my wife and children. You know, it's very risky suing the US government. I had served in the US government. They have huge resources. They have an advantage in the courts. And the pace of litigation is brutal. We had to win. There's no point in bringing the case just to lose.
Criminal
A Land Without Law
We recruited about 150 students, and they all worked on it around the clock for free while they were doing their schoolwork.