Travel ban gets OK
Supreme Court allows full enforcement until lawfulness decided
The Supreme Court gives President Trump a significant victory, ruling he may put his full travel ban into effect while appeals are weighed.
WASHINGTON — The Supreme Court on Monday allowed the third version of the Trump administration’s travel ban to go into effect while legal challenges against it continue. The decision was a victory for the administration after its mixed success before the court over the summer, when justices considered and eventually dismissed disputes over the second version.
The court’s brief, unsigned orders Monday urged appeals courts to move swiftly to determine whether the latest ban was lawful. Justices Ruth Bader Ginsburg and Sonia Sotomayor said they would have denied the administration’s request to allow the latest ban to go into effect.
The court’s orders mean that the administration can fully enforce its new restrictions on travel from eight nations, six of them predominantly Muslim. For now, most citizens of Iran, Libya, Syria, Yemen, Somalia, Chad and North Korea will be barred from entering the United States, along with some groups of people from Venezuela.
The restrictions vary in their details, but in most cases, citizens of the countries will be unable to immigrate to the United States permanently, and many will be barred from working, studying or vacationing here.
Iran, for example, will still be able to send its citizens on student exchanges, though such visitors will be subject to enhanced screening. Somalis will no longer be allowed to immigrate to the United States but may visit with extra screening.
The Supreme Court’s orders effectively overturned a compromise in place since June, when the court said travelers with connections to the United States could continue to travel here notwithstanding restrictions in an earlier version of the ban.
The move suggested that the administration’s chances of prevailing at the Supreme Court when the justices consider the lawfulness of the latest ban have markedly increased.
In a pair of filings in the Supreme Court, Solicitor General Noel J. Francisco said Trump had acted under his broad constitutional and statutory authority to control immigration when he issued a new proclamation in September announcing the new travel restrictions.
Lawyers with the American Civil Liberties Union, which represents people and groups challenging the ban, told the justices that little had changed. “The proclamation is the third order the president has signed this year banning more than 100 million individuals from Muslim-majority nations from coming to the United States,” they wrote.
Locally, University of Houston spokesman Mike Rosen said administrators plan to alert students from the affected countries to the federal policy changes on Tuesday.
“We make a habit of ensuring that our student community is aware of our policies that affect them (and) are related to national developments,” he said.
Rice University spokesman B.J. Almond said in an email that the school was reviewing the details of the announcement and any potential impact. The university’s Office of International Students and Scholars will keep students and faculty informed, he said.
Administrators at Texas Southern University did not immediately respond to requests for comment. The president of the University of Texas at Austin did not email students about the decision, a spokesman said.
After federal officials announced the initial executive order in late January, university leaders across the state tried to determine which of their students were directly affected by the ban and urged all students who are citizens of the countries named in that order to remain inside the United States as interpretations of the law shifted.