Trump vows ‘rapid’ action on travel ban
• President Donald Trump promised Friday to take action “very rapidly” to protect the U. S. and its citizens, a day after a federal appeals court firmly kept his travel ban on hold. He didn’t reveal his planned next step to control travel into the U.S. from countries that he considers potential terrorist threats.
“We’ll be doing things to continue to make our country safe,” Trump pledged. “It will happen rapidly. We will not allow people into our country who are looking to do harm to our people.”
Trump added that he still expects to prevail in a legal challenge to his travel ban, despite Thursday’s 3-0 ruling by the 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals that kept it from going back into effect.
“Ultimately, I have no doubt that we’ll win that particular case,” he said.
Trump stressed that voters elected him to keep the country secure, “so we’ ll be doing something very rapidly having to do with additional security for our country.
“You’ ll be seeing that sometime next week.”
Conjuring images of unspecified danger, Trump said he had “learned tremendous things that you could only learn, frankly, if you were in a certain position, namely president. And there are tremendous threats to our country. We will not allow that to happen, I can tell you that. We will not allow that to happen.”
Trump is standing by his argument that national security hangs in the balance. He issued an all-caps Tweet shortly after Thursday’s court ruling: “SEE YOU IN COURT, THE SECURITY OF OUR NATION IS AT STAKE!”
The Justice Department said it was “reviewing the decision and considering its options.”
It could appeal the restraining order on Trump’s travel ban to the U. S. Supreme Court or it could attempt to remake the case in the district court.
White House counsellor Kellyanne Conway suggested the next step would be to argue the merits of the executive order.
“The statute provides a president ... with great latitude and authority to protect the citizens and to protect the nation’s national security,” Conway said. “This was not argued on the merits. Now that we’ll have an opportunity to argue on the merits we look forward to doing that. We look forward to prevailing.”
The ruling represented a setback for Trump’s administration and the second legal defeat for the new president in the past week. Trump’s decision to sign the executive order late last month has sparked protests at airports around the world as authorities barred scores of travellers from entering the country amid confusion over how to implement the details.