The Gelernt Siblings’ High-Profile Cases

Twenty years ago, when Michelle Gelernt was a rookie public defender, she would often meet her older brother, Lee, an A.C.L.U. attorney, at a Tribeca pub called Walker’s. “We’d work till 2 A.M. and then come here,” Michelle said one evening last week. They had a lot to catch up on. The Trump era, just eleven days old, had thrown the Gelernts into the highest-profile litigation of their careers. Michelle, who is now a federal defender, had spent Inauguration Day (a.k.a. the National Day of Patriotic Devotion) at Brooklyn’s federal courthouse, advocating on behalf of Joaquín Guzmán, known as El Chapo, the extradited Mexican drug lord. A week later, in the same building, Lee, the deputy director of the A.C.L.U.’s Immigrants’ Rights Project, argued for an emergency stay of Trump’s “Muslim ban.”