U.S. TRAVEL BAN IN PARTIAL EFFECT
Order bans people from 6 countries who lack ‘bona fide’ relationship with US person or entity
WASHINGTON
UNITED States President Donald Trump’s order to block arrivals from six Muslim-majority countries took partial effect yesterday after he won a Supreme Court victory over rights groups.
But implementation of the order after five months of legal challenges could be chaotic, in part due to the meaning of a key term used in the court’s ruling on Monday: “bona fide”.
The court said Trump could only ban travellers from the targeted countries “who lack any bona fide relationship with a person or entity in the United States”.
With a 72-hour preparation period set before implementing the ban, the ruling has sent lawyers diving into legal texts to define that.
They need to set standards for US immigration officials and diplomats in Iran, Libya, Somalia, Sudan, Syria and Yemen, and also at US arrival points, who will decide who from those countries can still enter.
Lawyers and advocates both for and against the travel ban said the result could be a flood of legal challenges by travellers, immigrants and their supporters, further slowing arrivals from the six countries.
Immigrant advocates were preparing for the onset of the ban, saying they would be at airports to aid any arriving travelers that immigration officers seek to send back.
The New York Immigration Coalition yesterday said it planned to be at New York’s John F. Kennedy International Airport, “monitoring the effects of Trump’s revised Muslim and refugee ban”.
The Monday ruling capped five months of heavily politicised legal scrapping. The highest US court partially reversed lower courts’ freezes of Trump’s 90-day ban on travellers from the six countries, which he said was necessary to screen out potential terror threats.
It also allowed Trump to implement a 120-day ban on all refugees.
The court said it would review the overall case in October, meaning both bans would largely have run their course by then, though they could be extended if immigrant vetting processes were still judged to be too weak.
The refugee ban could be moot much sooner, as the Trump administration has cut the number of refugees it will accept annually to 50,000. The State Department on Tuesday said the threshold would be reached within the coming two weeks.
But many hopeful non-refugee travellers from the six countries could be affected. The court said only those with a significant or genuine — “bona fide” — relationship with a US person or group could be admitted during the period of the ban.
That will include, in the court’s example, those with close relatives, those admitted to universities, or accepted to a job, to gain entry.