Thiruvendran Vignarajah, the Deputy Attorney General for the State of Maryland and candidate for State’s Attorney for Baltimore City, gave a talk called “Justice for All in the Age of Trump.” The event was hosted by Hopkins College Democrats on Wednesday.
Vignarajah addressed the rollback of Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (DACA), Trump’s proposed travel ban and an end to mandatory minimum sentencing, which requires courts to give a minimum of a life sentence for the second offense of any serious crime.
An immigrant from Sri Lanka, Vignarajah attended Yale University and Harvard Law School, where he was elected president of the Harvard Law Review. He teaches crime policy and constitutional law at Hopkins and the University of Maryland Law School.
“I didn’t want to just talk about the issues that define my race here in Baltimore City. I wanted to talk about issues that define democracy and the democratic party here in Baltimore, in Maryland and across the country,” he said.
Recently, President Trump has announced that he will rescind DACA, which offers protections to undocumented immigrants who arrived in the country as children. The program was started as an executive order by President Obama.
“[Trump] has blamed them for crime in places like Baltimore and across the country. He has suggested that undocumented immigrants drive the challenges that he believes has plagued our country, our economy and our city,” he said.
Vignarajah said that a number of leaders have resisted the measure to rescind DACA, calling it inhumane and question whether it is constitutional.
He also argued that immigration enforcement today is criminal in nature, noting that deportations were previously run by the U.S. Department of the Treasury, not the U.S. Department of Homeland Security.
“Back then you didn’t have dissenting lawmen who were arbitrarily stopping anyone who was under suspicion of being in the country unlawfully, using their police powers to try to enforce immigration laws,” he said. “Today in 2017, the civil immigration apparatus of our country is virtually indistinguishable from our criminal apparatus.”
For his campaign for the State’s Attorney for Baltimore City, Vignarajah pledged to run an office that is transparent and accountable—traits that he says are missing in the nation’s highest office. He criticized the President’s attacks on the legal system.
“What Donald Trump is doing, perhaps as well as any politician in the history of this great nation, is to engage in spreading an element of fear and disinformation, in taking and exploiting the gaps in our knowledge of how the world works,” he said. “He targets groups that cannot stand out and speak out for themselves.”
Vignarajah also spoke about his legal philosophy. He believes in looking at the legislative history of a law, beyond what is written on the page. He used President Trump’s first travel ban, which targeted Muslim-majority countries, as an example.
“If the law says ‘we intend to discriminate,’ then perhaps you’re allowed to strike it down as discriminatory. But you can’t look at the motives of the legislators because it’s so complicated,” he said.
However, the President is a single voice, Vignarajah argued, and therefore his comments about an executive order should be considered in federal court. Vignarajah believes that elected officials should make and enforce the law in the way they intended.
He also addressed the rising crime rate in Baltimore, promising progressive solutions to the problem rather than the mandatory sentencing and zero tolerance methods that he says have failed. He said that President Trump’s attacks on judges have increased support for harsher sentencing.
“I am wondering why people are hailing mandatory minimums if 30% of the cases end up being dropped, and two-thirds of the cases that go to trial result in an acquittal,” he said. “Trump has made it fashionable to point the finger at judges, and it has caught fire here.”
Senior Anna Silk said that his pledge for transparency and progressive sentencing was appealing.
“He’s a very articulate and inspired speaker,” she said. “He really emphasizes the connections between issues happening in Baltimore and the federal framework of the Trump administration.”
