Justices seem skeptical of challenge to travel ban
Decision on whether to uphold Trump’s ban expected by late June
WASHINGTON — The Supreme Court’s five-member conservative majority appeared prepared Wednesday to sustain President Donald Trump’s authority to impose a travel ban restricting entry into the United States from several predominantly Muslim countries.
Those justices seemed ready to defer to Trump’s presidential national security judgments and to discount his campaign promises to impose a “Muslim ban.”
Immigrant rights groups had hoped that Chief Justice John Roberts or Justice Anthony Kennedy would join the court’s four-member liberal wing to oppose the ban. But their questioning was almost uniformly hostile to the challengers.
Just a week after he took office, Trump issued his first travel ban, causing chaos at the nation’s airports and starting a cascade of lawsuits and appeals. Fifteen months later, after two revisions of the ban and a sustained losing streak in the lower courts, the Supreme Court took up the case in its last scheduled argument of the term.
Although the court had considered aspects of an earlier version of the travel ban, this was the first time the justices heard arguments on any of the challenges. A decision is expected by late June.
The case, Trump v. Hawaii, concerns Trump’s third and most considered bid to make good on his campaign promise to secure the nation’s borders. Challengers to the latest ban, issued as a presidential proclamation in September, said Trump’s campaign speeches and tweets about Muslims were a clear indication that the ban was aimed at a particular religious group and not justified by security concerns.
The administration said the third order was the product of careful study by several agencies into the security and information-sharing practices of nations around the world. The president’s lawyers urged the courts to ignore Trump’s statements, and to focus solely on the text of the proclamation and the process that produced it.
Several justices asked Solicitor General Noel Francisco about the government’s national security justifications for the travel ban, pressing him to explain why the restrictions should not be seen as tainted by religious animus.
“This is not a so-called Muslim ban,” he said. “If it were, it would be the most ineffective Muslim ban that one could possibly imagine.”
Hawaii, several individuals and a Muslim group challenged the latest ban’s limits on travel from the predominantly Muslim nations; they did not object to the portions concerning North Korea and Venezuela. They prevailed before a U.S. District Court in Hawaii and before a three-judge panel of the 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals, in San Francisco.
The appeals court ruled that Trump had exceeded the authority that Congress had given him over immigration and had violated a part of the immigration laws barring discrimination in the issuance of visas.