Customs officials initially refused to let detainees consult with lawyers already gathered at Dulles, the DHS' inspector general said. | Getty DHS watchdog suggests customs officials may have violated court order at Dulles

The inspector general of the Department of Homeland Security suggested Wednesday that customs officers who blocked immigrants affected by President Donald Trump’s recent executive order from seeing lawyers at airports may have violated a court order.

Trump’s controversial executive order temporarily barring people from seven Muslim-majority countries from entering the U.S. caused widespread confusion when he signed it a week and a half ago, as travelers from those countries, some legal U.S. residents, were detained at airports. The order, temporarily blocked, has been challenged and is working its way through the courts.


The day after it went into effect, a federal judge said customs officials at Dulles had to provide detained travelers access to lawyers, but some attorneys charge that officials dragged their feet in complying. Customs officials initially refused to let detainees consult with lawyers already gathered at Dulles, they say, and instead provided them with phone numbers for legal services organizations that were mostly closed at the time.

Sen. Cory Booker, a Democrat and vocal critic of the executive order, asked the DHS inspector general, John Roth, on Wednesday whether that delay qualified as a violation of the judge’s order.

Questioning Roth at a Commerce Committee hearing, Booker said he arrived at the airport that evening with a copy of the court order in hand, but Customs and Border Patrol officials refused to meet with him, even though he had showed it to them.

Roth noted that customs officials would have to have intentionally ignored the order — meaning that they needed to know it existed — but affirmed that he would consider it a violation if that were the case.

“I know that they saw the order,” Booker said. “If the facts I’m relaying to you are correct, that they saw the court order and then still refused to allow lawyers back to meet with the people they were detaining, many of them for hours, that that fact pattern, that is a violation, correct?”

“Yes,” Roth said.