New US travel ban kicks in

PARAMETERS OF ‘BONA FIDE’ VISITOR UNCLEAR Lawyers expect a tide of legal challenges from travellers and immigrants.

US President Donald Trump’s order to block arrivals from six mainly Muslim 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 that 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 the US.

Lawyers and advocates both for and against the travel ban say 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 travellers that immigration officers seek to send back. The New York Immigration Coalition said yesterday it plans to be at New York’s John F Kennedy International Airport “monitoring the effects of Trump’s revised Muslim and refugee ban”.

The ruling on Monday capped five months of heavily politicised legal scrapping. The highest US court partially reversed lower courts’ freezes of Trump’s 90day 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 will review the overall case in October, meaning both bans will largely have run their course by then, though they could be extended if immigrant vetting processes are still judged to be too weak.

The refugee ban could be moot much sooner: the Trump administration has cut the number of refugees it will accept annually to 50 000. The State Department said on Tuesday that that threshold will be reached within the coming two weeks. – AFP