Second judge blocks parts of U.S.’ new travel ban

A federal judge in Maryland early Wednesday issued a second halt on the latest version of President Donald Trump’s travel ban, asserting that the president’s comments on the campaign trail and on Twitter convinced him that the directive was akin to an unconstitutional Muslim ban.

U.S. District Judge Theodore Chuang did not impose as stringent a limit on the travel ban as his counterpart in Hawaii a day earlier. Chuang ruled that the administration can enforce the directive on those who lack a “bona fide” relationship with a person or entity in the U.S., such as a family member or some type of professional or other engagement in the United States.

Chuang said the president’s own words cast his latest attempt to impose a travel blockade as the “inextricable re-animation of the twice-enjoined Muslim ban.”

The third iteration of Trump’s travel ban had been set to go fully into effect early Wednesday, barring various types of travelers from Syria, Libya, Iran, Yemen, Chad, Somalia, North Korea and Venezuela. Even before Chuang’s ruling, though, a federal judge in Hawaii had stopped the ban — at least temporarily — for all of the countries except North Korea and Venezuela.

That judge, Derrick Watson, blocked the administration from enforcing the measure on anyone from the six countries, not just those with a “bona fide” U.S. tie. But his ruling did not address whether Trump’s intent in imposing the directive was to discriminate against Muslims. He said the president had merely exceeded the authority Congress had given him in immigration law.

The Justice Department already had vowed to appeal Watson’s ruling, which the White House said “undercuts the President’s efforts to keep the American people safe and enforce minimum security standards for entry into the United States.” Both Watson’s temporary restraining order and Chuang’s preliminary injunction are interim measures, meant to maintain the status quo as the parties continue to argue the case.

The administration cast the new measure as one that is necessary for national security, implemented only after officials conducted an extensive review of the information they needed to vet those coming to the U.S. Those countries that were either unwilling or unable to produce such information even after negotiating, officials have said, were included on the banned list.

“These restrictions are vital to ensuring that foreign nations comply with the minimum security standards required for the integrity of our immigration system and the security of our Nation,” the White House said after Watson’s ruling. “We are therefore confident that the Judiciary will ultimately uphold the President’s lawful and necessary action and swiftly restore its vital protections for the safety of the American people.”

Like Watson’s order, Chuang’s 91-page ruling also found that Trump had exceeded his authority under immigration law, but only partially.

The order — which has “no specified end date and no requirement of renewal” — violated a nondiscrimination provision in the law in that it blocked immigrants to the U.S. based on their nationality, Chuang wrote.

But Chuang said he could not determine, as Watson did, that Trump had violated a different part of federal immigration law requiring him to find that entry of certain nonimmigrant travelers would be “detrimental” to U.S. interests before blocking them.

Chuang instead based much of his ruling on his assessment that Trump intended to ban Muslims, and thus his order had run afoul of the Establishment Clause of the Constitution. When he was a presidential candidate in December 2015, Chuang wrote, Trump had promised a “complete shutdown of Muslims entering the United States,” and his comments since then seemed to indicate his various travel bans were meant to fulfill that promise.

After the second ban was blocked, Chuang wrote, Trump described the measure as a “watered down version” of his initial measure, adding, “we ought [to] go back to the first one and go all the way, which is what I wanted to do in the first place.” The president had by that time revoked his first travel ban, which had also been held up in court.

Chuang noted that in August, with courts still weighing the second version, Trump “endorsed what appears to be an apocryphal story involving General John J. Pershing and a purported massacre of Muslims with bullets dipped in a pig’s blood, advising people to ‘[s]tudy what General Pershing … did to terrorists when caught.’”

In September, as authorities worked on a new directive, Trump wrote on Twitter that “the travel ban into the United States should be far larger, tougher and more specific — but stupidly, that would not be politically correct!”

The suit in federal court in Maryland had been filed by 23 advocacy groups and seven people who said they would be negatively affected by the new ban.