Sun Sentinel Palm Beach Edition
Supreme court upholds Trump travel ban
5-4 vote gives president major victory for policy
WASHINGTON — The Supreme Court on Tuesday handed President Donald Trump the most significant legal victory of his presidency, upholding the administration’s ban on foreign visitors and immigrants from several mostly Muslim countries.
By a 5-4 vote, the court’s conservative justices bolstered the chief executive’s power to control the borders, just as he is battling a growing crisis over the separation of families crossing illegally along the Mexico border.
The majority rejected arguments that Trump overstepped his presidential authority and that his targeting of Muslim-majority countries violated the Constitution’s ban on religious discrimination.
“For more than a century, this court has recognized the admission and exclusion of foreign nationals” is a matter for the president and Congress, and is “largely immune from judicial con-
trol,” said Chief Justice John Roberts for the court. “Foreign nationals seeking admission have no constitutional right to entry.”
The majority dismissed claims that Trump’s history of negative comments about Muslims — including a call during the 2016 presidential campaign for a Muslim ban — were relevant to the validity of his final travel order.
The current ban covers five Muslim-majority nations — Iran, Libya, Somalia, Syria and Yemen — as well as North Korea and some government officials from Venezuela. The administration was forced to revise the original order twice to resolve legal problems over due process, implementation and its exclusive targeting of Muslim nations.
The ruling is an implicit rebuke to the judges on the East and West coasts who repeatedly issued nationwide orders to block the travel ban.
Roberts pointed to one broadly worded provision in an immigration law that says the president may “suspend the entry … of any class of aliens” if he believes they “would be detrimental to the interests of the United States.” After a “multi-agency review... the president lawfully exercised that discretion,” he said in Trump vs. Hawaii.
Justices Anthony Kennedy, Clarence Thomas, Samuel Alito and Neil Gorsuch agreed.
The court’s decision comes as the Trump administration has attempted to impose a “zero tolerance” policy against foreigners who illegally cross the southern border. That sparked an international backlash after more than 2,000 children were forcibly separated from their parents, who are being held in immigration jails.
The four liberal dissenters said Trump’s order reflected bias against Muslims. Justices Sonia Sotomayor and Stephen Breyer read lengthy dissents in the courtroom Tuesday to express their displeasure. Sotomayor cited Trump’s campaign pledge to enact “a total and complete shutdown of Muslims entering the United States.”
She accused the majority of “turning a blind eye to the pain and suffering the (travel ban) inflicts upon countless families and individuals, many of whom are United States citizens.”
“Our Constitution demands, and our county deserves, a judiciary willing to hold the coordinate branches to account when they defy our most sacred legal commitments,” she said. The majority’s ruling “has failed in that respect.”
Trump praised the ruling as a “tremendous victory for the American people and the Constitution. In this era of worldwide terrorism and extremist movements bent on harming innocent civilians, we must properly vet those coming into our country,” he said. “This ruling is also a moment of profound vindication following months of hysterical commentary from the media and Democratic politicians who refuse to do what it takes to secure our border and our country.”
Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer, D-N.Y., said the “president’s travel ban doesn’t make us safer, and the Supreme Court’s ruling doesn’t make it right. This is a backward and un-American policy that fails to improve our national security.”
Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell, R-Ky., tweeted a photo of himself shaking hands with Gorsuch, Trump’s first court appointee, who joined the majority.
Despite the bitter dispute over the travel ban, the decision included one positive note that both sides celebrated: a formal repudiaton of the 1944 ruling in Korematsu vs. United States, which upheld the internment of 120,000 Japanese Americans on the West Coast.
Calling that ruling a “shameful precedent,” Sotomayor said she saw “stark parallels” with the travel ban ruling because both accepted the government’s claim that national security was at stake.
This prompted a sharp retort from Roberts.
“Whatever rhetorical advantage the dissent may see in doing so, Korematsu has nothing to do with this case,” he wrote. “The forcible relocation of U.S. citizens to concentration camps, solely and explicitly on the basis of race, is objectively unlawful and outside the scope of the presidential authority. But it is wholly inapt to liken that morally repugnant order” to a policy “denying certain foreign nationals the privilege of admission.”