U.S. travel ban to be enforced
WASHINGTON • The Supreme Court on Monday granted President Donald Trump’s request that his revised travel ban be enforced fully while legal challenges to it proceed in lower courts.
The justices approved a request from the president’s lawyers to lift restrictions on the order — which bans most travellers from eight nations, most with Muslim majorities — that had been imposed by lower courts.
The court gave no reason for its decision, but said it expected lower court review of the executive orders to proceed quickly. Justices Ruth Bader Ginsburg and Sonia Sotomayor would have kept in place partial stays on the order.
Judges in two judicial circuits — the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 4th Circuit in Richmond and the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 9th Circuit in San Francisco — had cast doubt on Trump’s third executive order banning almost all travel from certain countries.
Oral arguments are scheduled shortly in both federal appeals court cases on whether the ban exceeds the president’s broad powers on immigration.
The latest iteration, the third ban that Trump has ordered, blocks various people from eight countries — Syria, Libya, Iran, Yemen, Chad, Somalia, North Korea and Venezuela. Six of the countries have Muslim majorities.
But federal judges in Maryland and Hawaii have blocked its implementation for “foreign nationals who have a credible claim of a bona fide relationship with a person or entity in the United States.”
The language is drawn from a Supreme Court decision last June that exempted such foreign nationals from Trump’s second version of the executive order, which expired this fall.
Lawyers for Hawaii, one of the challengers to the travel bans, said the government’s case has weakened.
“The government’s national security rationales have also grown more attenuated: The order itself acknowledges that the affected aliens can safely be vetted and granted entry, so long as they seek visas the government prefers, and the government’s delay in requesting a stay makes plain that no exigency warrants this court’s immediate intervention.”
Solicitor General Noel Francisco, representing the Trump administration, argued just the opposite. The new executive order, he wrote, followed a “comprehensive, worldwide review of the information shared by foreign governments that is used to screen aliens seeking entry to the U.S.
“Based on that review, the proclamation adopts tailored entry restrictions to address extensive findings that a handful of particular foreign governments have deficient information-sharing and identity-management practices, or other risk factors.”