Michael W. Bien

A prominent advocate for people in custody, Bien has won significant victories for California prison inmates at the state and U.S. Supreme Courts. He has been litigating what he describes as “the case of my lifetime” on their behalf for more than 30 years.

Yet the case he considers his most significant recently went from initial problem to dispositive ruling in barely six weeks. In that matter, Bien and a team of lawyers he assembled blocked President Donald J. Trump’s executive order banning the Chinese app WeChat in the United States before implementing regulations could take effect.

Trump issued the order prohibiting any U.S. transactions over WeChat on Aug. 6, 2020. Two weeks later, a group of Chinese and Chinese American users hired Bien’s firm to challenge the executive order directly, rather than wait 45 days for regulations. “That made the litigation far more challenging,” he said.

He described WeChat as a “super-app” that includes many functions from social media and texting to transferring money and transacting business. For millions of U.S. users, it is the only way to communicate with family in China or run their businesses. Among other constitutional problems raised by the order, a ban on the app would impinge on U.S. users’ First Amendment rights, Bien said.

The litigation wasn’t meant to defend China, he said. “What we were defending were American constitutional freedoms of speech and assembly and press. WeChat is how people read the New York Times and the Wall Street Journal, as well as Chinese publications.”

His firm sued for a preliminary injunction on Aug. 21 and argued the case on Thursday, Sept. 17. Early the next morning, the Commerce Department issued its regulations, leading U.S. Magistrate Judge Laurel Beeler to require amended pleadings for later that day and new arguments the next afternoon, which was Rosh Hashanah. Beeler granted the preliminary injunction Saturday midnight. U.S. WeChat Users Alliance v. Trump, 488 F.Supp.3d 912 (N.D. Cal., Sept. 19, 2020).

“Obviously, it was a very unique, cutting-edge kind of case,” Bien said. President Biden revoked Trump’s original order in June.

Meanwhile, Bien continues his “case of a lifetime,” Coleman v. Newsom, to protect California prisoners with serious mental illness. “We’re not going to fix everything, but we’re on the right path. And I think we are getting there,” he said.

— Don DeBenedictis