Legal challenges greet new travel ban
Lawsuit from Hawaii demands clarification on how Trump decided
President Trump’s scaled- back travel ban against six majority- Muslim nations operated without disruptions at airports Friday as opponents challenged its restrictive rules on who is permitted entry into the USA.
The American Civil Liberties Union and immigration advocacy groups reported no big problems with the ban, which went into effect Thursday, unlike Trump’s first, broader order that left hundreds of travelers from abroad in legal limbo in late January.
“I am not aware of any refugees being detained as a result of this executive order,” Betsy Fisher, policy director for the International Refugee Assistance Project, said Friday.
After the Supreme Court allowed the revised ban to go into effect, legal challenges quickly surfaced. Hawaii’s attorney general filed a lawsuit late Thursday to try to force the Trump administration to clarify how it created its list of people who will be banned and those who won’t. The concern is that the administration is setting rules that may limit entry more than the Supreme Court intended.
In a ruling Monday, the court allowed the administration to enforce its 90- day travel ban against nationals of Iran, Libya, Somalia, Sudan, Syria and Yemen, so the government can tighten its screening to keep terrorists from sneaking into the country.
The court ordered the administration to allow entry to people from those countries who could prove a “bona fide” relationship with a U. S. person or entity.
The State Department concluded that foreigners who have a parent, spouse, fiancée, child, adult son or daughter, son- in- law, daughter- in- law or sibling in the USA qualified under that definition. The department said foreigners’ grandparents, grandchildren, aunts, uncles, nieces and nephews did not qualify and would be banned.
The State Department said Thursday that it used a definition of family written into federal law under the Immigration and Nationality Act.
Fisher said the administration clearly sought the most restrictive definition it could find, and she warned that it could violate the directives from the Supreme Court. “It’s quite clear that the relationships intended to be protected were broader than just one degree of separation,” Fisher said.
Lee Gelernt, an ACLU attorney involved in legal challenges against the ban, said more lawsuits could follow if the State Department does not expand its definition of a “bona fide” relationship. “We are still hoping the government will make it unnecessary to proceed with litigation by rethinking how they are implementing the Supreme Court’s decision,” Gelernt said.