Trump travel ban on more solid ground as top court cancels hearing
NEW YORK, (Reuters) - The Supreme Court signaled yesterday it may dismiss a challenge to President Donald Trump’s controversial travel ban after the White House announced tailored restrictions on eight countries that legal experts said stand a better chance at holding up in court.
The high court canceled oral arguments scheduled for Oct. 10 to decide whether or not a March 6 executive order that temporarily blocked travel from six Muslim-majority countries was discriminatory.
That ban expired on Sunday. The president replaced it with a proclamation that indefinitely restricts travel from Iran, Libya, Syria, Yemen, Somalia, Chad and North Korea. Certain government officials from Venezuela will also be barred. The new ban, Trump’s third, could affect tens of thousands of potential immigrants and visitors.
Trump has been trying for most of the year to create a ban that passes court muster. The Sunday proclamation, which he said is needed to screen out terrorist or public safety threats, could be less vulnerable to legal attack, scholars and other experts said, because it is the result of a months-long analysis of foreign vetting procedures by U.S. officials.
It also might be less easily tied to Trump’s campaign-trail statements some courts viewed as biased against Muslims.
“The greater the sense that the policy reflects a considered, expert judgment, the less the temptation (by courts) to secondguess the executive,” said Saikrishna Prakash, a professor at the University of Virginia School of Law, in an email. “It looks less like a matter of prejudice or a desire to fulfill a campaign promise.”
In its brief order, the high court asked the Trump administration and the ban’s challengers, including states and refugee advocacy organizations, to file briefs on whether the case should be dismissed.
Trump’s March 6 ban sparked international outrage and was quickly blocked by federal courts as unconstitutional discrimination or a violation of immigration law.
In June, the Supreme Court allowed a limited version of the ban to go ahead while the justices prepared to hear arguments over its legality on Oct. 10, a date they have now scrubbed.
In 2016, more than 72,000 nonimmigrant and immigrant visas were issued to the countries covered by the new ban, excluding Venezuela, with nearly half of those going to Iran. Only nine North Koreans immigrated to the United States in 2016 and 100 were granted nonimmigrant visas.
The new ban is set to go into effect on Oct. 18, but it already applies to five of the six countries covered by the March 6 ban, according to a U.S. State Department cable issued on Sunday and obtained by Reuters. (To read the full cable click here: http://live.reuters.com/Event/Liv e_US_Politics/1093572667)
Sudan was dropped from the list of banned countries after the Sudanese government provided information required under the new criteria set out by the Trump administration earlier this year, a White House official said on Monday.
The government has said the president has broad authority in immigration and national security matters, but challengers to the March ban had argued that it ran afoul of the U.S. Constitution’s bar on favoring one religion over another.