Melania Trump’s Jewish Immigration Lawyer Takes On Donald’s Muslim Ban
Graphic by Angelie Zaslavsky
By Naomi Zeveloff February 7, 2017
Melania Trump’s Jewish immigration lawyer has joined the fight against Donald Trump’s travel ban on immigrants from seven Muslim countries.
Michael Wildes, the grandson of a Holocaust survivor and the former mayor of Englewood, New Jersey, is representing two elderly Sudanese green card holders who were due to travel back to the U.S. from Sudan when the travel ban was signed.
Wildes told Haaretz that the ban is “unconstitutional” and “wrong and hurtful.”
Wildes represented Trump Models for 10 years. Last summer, he vouched that Melania Trump had worked in America legally as the Slovenia-born model’s work history was in question during the presidential campaign.
Wildes, a Democrat, believes that Melania Trump has “great compassion” for immigrants like the ones banned by Donald Trump’s executive order. “She’ll be the Queen Esther in this story,” he said.
Defense for immigrants runs in the Wildes family. His father, Leon Wildes, famously stopped Richard Nixon from deporting John Lennon.
The elder Wildes paved the way for the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals, which helps prevent undocumented immigrants who came to the United States as children from being deported. Wildes is currently representing several DACA students at Yeshiva University.
Contact Naomi Zeveloff at [email protected]
It’s our birthday and we’re still celebrating!
We hope you appreciated this article. Before you go, we’d like to ask you to please support the Forward’s independent Jewish news.
This week we celebrate 129 years of the Forward. We’re proud of our origins as a Yiddish print publication serving Jewish immigrants. And we’re just as proud of what we’ve become today: A trusted source of Jewish news and opinion, available digitally to anyone in the world without paywalls or subscriptions.
We’ve helped five generations of American Jews make sense of the news and the world around them — and we aren’t slowing down any time soon.
As a nonprofit newsroom, reader donations make it possible for us to do this work. Support independent, agenda-free Jewish journalism and our board will match your gift in honor of our birthday!
Support our mission to tell the Jewish story fully and fairly.
