TikTok Employees to Sue Trump Administration over Executive Order Ban

U.S. employees of the popular Chinese-owned social media app TikTok reportedly plan to file a lawsuit against the Trump administration over a recent executive order banning the app.

CNET reports that TikTok’s U.S. employees plan to file a lawsuit challenging a recent executive order passed by the Trump administration making it illegal TikTok to pay its employees in the United States. The executive order barred any U.S. transactions with TikTok’s parent company ByteDance, due to the broad language used in the order it is unclear if TikTok employees would be paid by the company.

The order is set to take effect on September 20 and would ban the video app from operating in the U.S. if ByteDance doesn’t sell its operations. Currently, U.S. tech giant Microsoft is in talks with ByteDance about purchasing the app’s service in the U.S., Canada, Australia, and New Zealand.

Prominent internet right’s lawyer Mike Godwin is reportedly one of the attorney’s working on a lawsuit against the Trump administration according to a tweet from the lawyer in which he stated: “I believe that the U.S. government with its overbroad executive order has put employees’ Constitutional rights, including the right to be paid, in jeopardy.”

In an interview, Godwin stated that the executive order violated the 5th and 14th amendment of the U.S. Constitution, which states that no one shall be “deprived of life, liberty or property without due process of law.”

Godwin, who’s working with the Blackstone Law Group in New York, commented: “It’s fundamentally a due process claim, but there are some employment law claims that also may be relevant. We just want to make sure that we check all the boxes.”

Godwin was hired by Patrick Ryan, a TikTok employee who started a GoFundMe campaign to raise $30,000 to “file an injunction so that a court can order the government to change the order so that TikTok can still pay employees.”