Travel ban is upheld
Supreme Court ruling is big win for Trump
WASHINGTON — A sharply divided Supreme Court upheld President Donald Trump’s ban on travel from several mostly Muslim countries Tuesday, the conservative majority taking his side in a major ruling supporting his presidential power. A dissenting liberal justice said the court was making a historic mistake by refusing to recognize the ban discriminates against Muslims.
The 5-4 decision was a big victory for Mr. Trump in the court’s first substantive ruling on one of his administration’s policies. It also was the latest demonstration of a newly invigorated conservative majority and a bitter defeat for the court’s liberals.
The ruling came on an issue that has been central for Mr. Trump, from his campaign outbursts against “radical Islamic terrorism” through his presidency. He tweeted a quick reaction — “Wow!” — and then celebrated at greater length before TV cameras.
Local Muslims were dismayed by the ruling.
“The thing I think is the worst part is that we feel totally comfortable bombing Muslim lands and accidentally destroying homes and civilian infrastructure and claiming we are liberating the oppressed
people from the dictators of those lands,” said Wasi Mohamed, executive director of the Islamic Center of Pittsburgh.
But then the United States doesn’t accept those fleeing those lands.
“We as a public are more comfortable creating refugees than taking them in,” said Mr. Mohamed, who is also the Pennsylvania director of Emgage, an organization seeking to mobilize Muslims politically.
He pledged continued work to make sure Muslims don’t face government discrimination.
Safdar Khwaja, president of the Pittsburgh chapter of the Council on AmericanIslamic Relations, said the 5-4 vote on the court “tells you it’s not a national-security issue, it’s a partisan issue. If it was national security, it would have been unanimous.”
He said there’s every reason to fear Mr. Trump will expand the travel ban to other Muslim-majority countries. Mr. Trump is making good on his campaign statements, he said, including his call for “a total and complete shutdown of Muslim sentering the United States until our country’s representatives can figure out what is going on.”
Mr. Khwaja said: “He should have figured out what the hell is going on by now. He’s been [in office] for a year and a half.”
Chief Justice John Roberts wrote the majority opinion for the five conservative justices, including Trump nominee Neil Gorsuch, who got his seat only after Republicans blocked then-President Barack Obama’s nominee for the last 10 months of Mr.Obama’s term.
Justice Roberts wrote that the travel ban was well within U.S. presidents’ authority over immigration and responsibility for keeping the nation safe. He rejected the challengers’ claim of anti-Muslim bias.
But Justice Roberts was careful not to endorse either Mr. Trump’s statements about immigration in general or Muslims in particular.
“We express no view on the soundness of the policy,” Justice Roberts wrote.
The ban has been fully in place since December, when the justices put the brakes on lower court rulings that blocked part of it from being enforced. It applies even to people with close relatives in the United States and other strong connections to the country.
In a dissent she summarized aloud in court, Justice Sonia Sotomayor said, “History will not look kindly on the court’s misguided decision today, nor should it.” Justices Stephen Breyer, Ruth Bader Ginsburg and Elena Kagan also dissented.
Justice Sotomayor wrote that her colleagues in the majority arrived at the opposite result by “ignoring the facts, misconstruing our legal precedent and turning a blind eye to the pain and suffering the Proclamation inflicts upon countless families and individuals, many of whom are United States citizens.”
She likened the case to the discredited Korematsu V. U.S. decision that upheld the detention of JapaneseAmericans during World War II. Justice Roberts responded in his opinion that “Korematsu has nothing to do with this case” and “was gravely wrong the day it was decided.”
The Trump policy applies to travelers from five countries with overwhelmingly Muslim populations — Iran, Libya, Somalia, Syria and Yemen. It also affects two non-Muslim countries, blocking travelers from North Korea and some Venezuelan government officials and their families. A sixth majority Muslim country, Chad, was removed from the list in April.
The administration had pointed to the Chad decision to show that the restrictions were premised only on national security concerns.
The challengers, though, argued that the court could not just ignore all that had happened, beginning with Mr. Trump’s campaign tweets to prevent the entry of Muslims into the U.S.
Mr. Trump had proposed a broad, all-encompassing Muslim ban during the presidential campaign in 2015, drawing swift, bipartisan rebukes. And within a week of taking office, the first travel ban was announced with little notice, sparking chaos at airports and protests across the nation.
Mr. Trump hailed the court ruling as “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.”
Critics of the ban had urged the justices to affirm the decisions in lower courts that generally concluded that the changes made to the travel policy did not erase the ban’s legal problems. Mr. Trump had also imposed a temporary ban on refugees along with earlier versions of the travel ban, but he did not reimpose a refugee ban when the last one expired in the fall.
The current travel ban dates from September and it followed what the administration has called a thorough review by several federal agencies, although no such review has been shared with courts or the public.
Federal judges in Hawaii and Maryland had blocked the travel ban, finding that the new version looked too much like its predecessors. Those rulings were largely upheld by federal appeals courts in Richmond, Va., and San Francisco.
But the Supreme Court came to a different conclusion Tuesday. The policy has “a legitimate grounding in national security concerns,” and it has several moderating Justice Roberts said.
Challengers to the ban asserted that Mr. Trump’s statements crossed a constitutional line, Justice Roberts said.
“But the issue before us is not whether to denounce the statements. It is instead the significance of those statements in reviewing a Presidential directive, neutral on its face, addressing a matter within the core of executive responsibility,” he said.