The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
Supreme Court upholds travel ban
Conservatives, in 5-4 vote, cite president’s statutory authority.
WASHINGTON — The Supreme Court upheld President Donald Trump’s ban on travel from several predominantly Muslim countries, delivering to the president on Tuesday a political victory and an endorsement of his power to control immigration at a time of political upheaval about the treatment of migrants at the Mexican border.
In a 5-4 vote, the court’s conservatives said the president’s power to secure the country’s borders, delegated by Congress
over decades of immigration lawmaking, was not undermined by Trump’s history of incendiary statements about the dangers he said Muslims pose to the United States.
Writing for the majority, Chief Justice John Roberts said Trump had ample statutory authority to make national security judgments in the realm of immigration. And Roberts rejected a constitutional challenge to Trump’s third executive order on the matter, issued in September as a proclamation.
But the court’s liberals denounced the decision. In a passionate and searing dissent from the bench, Justice Sonia Sotomayor said the decision was no better than Korematsu v. United States, the 1944 decision that endorsed the detention of Japanese-Americans during World War II.
She praised the court for officially overturning Korematsu in its decision Tuesday. But by upholding the travel ban, Sotomayor said, the court “merely replaces one gravely wrong decision with another.”
Trump, who has battled court challenges to the travel ban since the first days of his administration, hailed the decision to uphold his third version as a “tremendous victory” and promised to continue using his office to defend the country against terrorism, crime and extremism.
“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,” the president said in a statement issued by the White House soon after the decision was announced.
The vindication for Trump was also a stunning political validation of the Republican strategy of obstruction throughout 2016 that prevented President Barack Obama from seating Judge Merrick B. Garland on the nation’s highest court. Justice Neil M. Gorsuch, Trump’s choice to sit on the court, was part of the majority upholding the president’s travel ban.
The decision came even as Trump is facing controversy over his decision to impose “zero tolerance” at the United States’ southwestern border, leading to politically damaging images of children being separated from their parents as families cross into the country without proper documentation.
But as Trump celebrates his travel ban victory, he also faces a new legal challenge, as 17 states filed a lawsuit Tuesday in federal court seeking to stop family separations at the border.
The court’s travel ban decision provides new political ammunition for the president and members of his party as they prepare to face the voters in the fall. Trump has already made clear his plans to use anti-immigrant messaging as he campaigns for Republicans, much the way he successfully deployed the issue to whip up the base of the party during the 2016 presidential campaign.
Trump and his advisers have long argued that presidents are given vast authority to reshape the way the United States controls its borders. The president’s attempts to do that began with the travel ban and continues today with his demand for an end to the “catch and release” of unauthorized immigrants.
In remarks Tuesday in a meeting with lawmakers, Trump hailed the Supreme Court’s ruling and vowed to continue fighting for a wall across the southern border with Mexico — his favorite physical manifestation of the legal powers that the court says he rightly wields to secure the United States’ borders.
“We have to be tough and we have to be safe and we have to be secure,” he said, adding that construction of the wall “stops the drugs.”
“It stops people we don’t want to have,” the president said.
Critics of Trump’s travel ban assailed the ruling. Several hundred angry protest-- Protesters holding signs reading “No Muslim ban” rally against President Donald Trump’s travel ban Tuesday outside the U.S. Supreme Court in Washington. The court upheld the ban. ers gathered in Washing- ton on the court’s marble steps with signs that read, “No Ban, No Wall,” “Resist Trump’s Hate” and “Refu- gees Welcome!”
In New York City, about three dozen activists, govern- ment officials and concerned citizens denounced the travel ban, declaring that the court was on the “wrong side of history.” Bitta Mostofi, the commissioner of immigrant affairs for the New York mayor’s office, called the ruling an “institutionalization of Islamophobia and racism.”
Sen. Robert Menendez, D-N.J., wrote “today is a sad day for American institutions, and for all religious minorities who have ever sought refuge in a land promising freedom.” The Baptist Joint Committee for Religious Liberty said in a statement “we are deeply disappointed by the Supreme Court’s refusal to repudiate policy rooted in animus against Muslims.”
Trump’s ban on travel had been in place since Decem- ber, when the court denied a request from challengers to block it. Tuesday’s rul- ing lifts the legal cloud over the policy.
Roberts acknowledged that Trump had made many statements concerning his desire to impose a “Muslim ban.” He recounted the president’s call for a “total and complete shutdown of Muslims entering the United States,” and he noted that the president has said that “Islam hates us” and has asserted that the United States was “having problems with Muslims coming into the country.”
But the chief justice said the president’s comments must be balanced against the enumerated powers of the president to conduct the national security affairs of the nation.
“The issue before us is not whether to denounce the statements,” Roberts wrote. “It is instead the significance of those statements in review- ing a presidential directive, neutral on its face, addressing a matter within the core of executive responsibility.”
“In doing so,” he wrote, “we must consider not only the statements of a particu- lar president, but also the authority of the presidency itself.”
The chief justice repeat- edly echoed Stephen Miller, Trump’s top immigration adviser, in citing a provision of immigration law that gives presidents the power to “suspend the entry of all aliens or any class of aliens” as they see necessary.