Late last month islander Colleen Melody was spending a Saturday morning working at home when she began receiving phone calls about President Donald Trump’s executive order, barring people from seven countries from entering the country.

Melody, who heads the Wing Luke Civil Rights Unit within the Washington State Attorney General’s office, said she fielded calls from government officials, lawyers and nonprofit advocates waiting at the airport or receiving panicked calls from people expecting family members who did not arrive.

“There were lots of calls about the crisis and chaos around the state,” she said. “That is how we started to realize the serious negative impacts of the order.”

The fact that it would have otherwise been a quiet weekend day was irrelevant, given the developing situation.

“We are connected to one another and in touch with one another, especially when there are emergencies, which this was,” she added.

By now, the events that precipitated that flurry of phone calls are familiar to many people in the United States and around the world. On Friday, Jan. 27, near the end of the work day in Washington D.C., Trump signed the order, “Protecting the Nation from Foreign Terrorist Entry into the United States.” It went into effect immediately and barred admission to the United States to all people from Iraq, Iran, Libya, Somalia, Sudan, Syria and Yemen for 90 days. It also barred entry to all refugees for 120 days and placed an indefinite ban on refugees from Syria.

On Saturday, Jan. 28, Melody said, it became clear that the Office of the Attorney General had to take action. Work teams were quickly created, and those involved began to work immediately from home. By 4 a.m. Sunday, she said, people were in place in the office, preparing to file suit to invalidate the order.

“That is what happened for the next two weeks,” she said. “We would work in shifts and plan when we could sleep or rest so that work was being done nearly round the clock.”

Within the Attorney General’s Office, Melody said at least eight people worked almost constantly, and many others contributed to the work where they had special expertise, ranging from the solicitor general and the attorney general — those who rank the highest in the office — to legal assistants, who were sometimes called upon at 3 a.m.

Many outside the legal system also played an important role, she said, including other state employees. She noted that the state employs immigrants, including some from the affected countries, and state employees worked hard to provide evidence and data to support the claims about the impact of the executive order.

On Monday, Jan. 30, in federal district court, Washington state filed its lawsuit and a motion seeking a temporary restraining order to stop the ban. On Friday, Feb. 3, U.S. District Judge James L. Robart granted the restraining order, blocking enforcement of the ban across the country. Meanwhile, round-the-clock work continued at the Attorney General’s Office. The Department of Justice filed an appeal of the restraining order on Feb. 4 in the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals, and on Feb. 6, Washington and Minnesota filed a brief, arguing, in part, that the executive order caused irreparable harm to businesses, schools, family relations and state residents’ freedom to travel. On Feb. 7, Justice Department lawyers and attorneys for Washington and Minnesota presented oral arguments to the Ninth Circuit Court. Two days later the court denied the Department of Justice’s bid for an emergency stay, prompting a press conference in Seattle, where Attorney General Bob Ferguson, flanked by staff members, including Melody, called the decision a complete victory for the state of Washington.

In a light moment, Melody joked that lawyers have only a limited number of temporary restraining orders they can take part in during their careers — similar to a cat using up some of its nine lives — because of the emergency nature and large amount of work in such a short amount of time involved.

This is the third restraining order of this nature for Melody — but with substantial differences from the others.

“Certainly, this is the first one that involved federal defendants and a nationwide program,” she said. “Usually the scope is more discreet.”

Melody has served as the head the civil rights division in the Attorney General’s office since January 2015, when Ferguson created the division. Prior to that, she worked in Washington D.C. for the United States Department of Justice, under former U.S. Attorney General Eric Holder, in the civil rights division. After Trump issued the executive order and she understood what it meant, she said she immediately thought it was a civil rights case, adding that it is also a constitutional case, an executive power case and a national security case.

“But it is a civil rights case because our civil rights statutes and the constitutional provisions that complement them have these basic values in them that we treat each other fairly, and we do not make determinations about each other based on blanket criteria like religion or national origin,” she said. “We just don’t do that. When I read (the order), it just struck me as in total conflict with what I understand to be our constitutional values and our history as a country, of recognizing that broad-based characterizations or stereotypes are inaccurate and unfair.”

She added that she and many of her coworkers have worked with immigrants and refugees and understand the complexities and demands that come with acquiring lawful permanent resident status.

“The idea that it could be taken away from somebody, based not on what they did, but on where they were born, something that they do not control, that is not something that is consistent with our values as Americans,” she said.

Washington, she added, is a diverse state. Western Washington has a large tech sector that relies on highly skilled workers from some of the countries included in the ban, but there are immigrant workers around the state.

“It is a mistake to think this ban affects only high-tech workers in Redmond,” she said.

She added that Washington State University in Pullman has more students from the banned countries than the University of Washington does and that hundreds of students were affected.

“There are over 400 students in our university systems who, by operation of law, at the stroke of a pen, who were perhaps sitting in their dorm room … that according to the terms of the order, the moment it was signed had no permission to be here,” she said.

She added that stories poured in from all over, from the airports initially, but then company board rooms, from schools concerned about the short- and long-term effects of the order and people simply in their living rooms worried about stranded family members.

In one case, she said, her office learned about an Iranian family who had waited four years to obtain visas, sold their house and car and converted their money to U.S. currency. They boarded a plane to come to the United States, only to be turned around in Amsterdam and sent back to Iran. There, it is illegal to possess or spend U.S. currency; they had no place to live, and government officials had been alerted that they had planned to emigrate.

Other stories came in of people who could not obtain necessary medical care, or attend a family member’s funeral and of siblings who had not seen each other in years and were denied, at the last moment, the opportunity to do so.

“These are the kinds of individual, real human impacts that happen when a policy is developed hastily, when input was apparently not sought … and when it is implemented on a Friday afternoon with no notice,” she said.

Support from across the state poured into the Attorney General’s Office as well, Melody said, from offers to buy pizza for those working late to pictures drawn by third-graders in Yakima, showing people of all different colors holding American flags.

“What that means is that this action and the way it was implemented struck a chord with so many people across the state and across the political spectrum,” she said. “I do not view this as a political case at all. I think the support we have received is evidence of that.”

Looking ahead, Melody said she is hopeful, based in part on what she has seen in Washington in recent weeks, including the number of committed people who were ready and able to assist when the need arose.

“It was lawyers and advocates and social service groups, from churches to high-end legal firms, who have all pitched in to make sure that we got this taken care of. I have been impressed by that,” she said. “People really stepped up. I think Washingtonians should be proud of each other for the way that we responded and worked together in an emergency circumstance.”