Last night, CCR and The Jerome L. Greene Performance Space at WNYC, in association with The Public Theater's Public Forum, hosted an evening of storytelling and conversation about CCR’s Supreme Court case Ziglar v. Abbasi and ongoing efforts to challenge institutionalized Islamophobia and the abuse of executive power. 

This month, the Supreme Court heard their final cases under the Obama administration. The last, Ziglar v. Abbasi, was argued on January 18 by CCR Senior Staff Attorney Rachel Meeropol. CCR filed the case on behalf of Muslim, South Asian, and Arab men who were rounded up, detained in brutal conditions of confinement and abused for months, and eventually deported in the wake of 9/11 based on their race, religion, ethnicity, and immigration status. 

In Letters from Detention, Jessica Blank and Erik Jensen (authors of The Exonerated and Aftermath) presented a moving and hopeful theatrical performance, adapted from a series of letters exchanged between CCR clients Yasser Ebrahim and Hany Ibrahim, two brothers held on separate floors of the Metropolitan Detention Center in Brooklyn for months after 9/11. Following the performance, we convened a conversation with Monami Maulik (founder of DRUM-Desis Rising Up & Moving and currently working with UN Women); attorney Rachel Meeropol (Senior Staff Attorney for CCR and counsel for the plaintiffs in Ziglar v. Abbasi); and Elie Mystal (Radiolab Presents: More Perfect and Managing Editor of Above the Law's "Redline”), discussing how we hold our government, and each other, accountable for the safety and well-being of all and what role the courts can, should, and will play in reining in executive excess.

Watch the full event below: