Challengers argue the ban’s intent has been to discriminate based on religion or nationality, but supporters of it are trying to classify it as something else

At midnight on Thursday, Donald Trump’s renewed executive order restricting travel from six Muslim-majority nations was scheduled to go into effect. More than 15 months have passed since, in the wake of a horrific mass shooting in San Bernardino, then candidate Trump announced his intention to impose a “total and complete shutdown of Muslims entering the United States”.

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The statement, which some at the time deemed radical enough to end his chance at the presidency, was never seriously walked back by Trump or his campaign in the intervening months, right through his victory in the 2016 election. In June 2016, for example, Trump reiterated at a campaign rally: “I called for a ban after San Bernardino and was met with great scorn and anger. But now … many are saying that I was right to do so.”

This profession of a Muslim ban is at the heart of legal challenges now making their way through courts across the US. Challengers argue that, regardless of what Trump and his administration officials actually said, his intent was and always has been to discriminate based on religion or nationality – to block Muslims from entering in particular, in violation of the US constitution. In the intervening months, Trump and his surrogates’ statements have been mixed.

It wasn’t until after Trump actually signed an immigration order resembling the ban he had once proposed that there emerged a concerted effort by the administration to classify it as something else. “This is not a Muslim ban, as the media is falsely reporting,” Trump said in January after his first executive order was stayed in a series of federal court rulings. “This is not about religion – this is about terror and keeping our country safe.”

There was within the administration some initial flip-flopping about the use of the word “ban” during the order’s rollout.

The president “made very clear that this is not a Muslim ban, it’s not a travel ban”, Spicer said during a press briefing, despite Trump referring to the order that same week as a “very, very strict ban”, and despite similar language on official administration materials and websites.

The semantics of “ban” aside, the administration has mostly been in lockstep since January in rebranding Trump’s executive order as something far and away from his bombastic campaign promise to explicitly profile by religion.

“These seven countries. What about the 46 majority-Muslim countries that are not included?” Kellyanne Conway asked Fox News’ Chris Wallace in the same interview where she famously referred to a non-existent “Bowling Green Massacre”.

“It totally undercuts this nonsense that this is a Muslim ban,” she continued.

But there have been startling missteps from the administration in promoting this narrative as well. Trump’s cybersecurity adviser, Rudy Giuliani, gleefully summarized his involvement in drafting the initial executive order in late January during a Fox News appearance. “I’ll tell you the whole history of it: when he first announced it, he said ‘Muslim ban’,” Giuliani said. “He called me up, he said: ‘Put a commission together, show me the right way to do it legally.’”

Giuliani said he brought together lawmakers and expert lawyers, “and what we did was we focused on, instead of religion, danger”.

Giuliani went on to distance the policy from an outright ban on Muslims, but chose a curiously revealing way of doing so, describing the executive order as a “way to do [a Muslim ban] legally”.

In a February interview with Rolling Stone, Trump advisor Stephen Miller also defended the ban, arguing that “there is no religious exclusion, test or establishment of any kind, shape or form whatsoever”. Miller continued: “We should seek to admit people who will be able to embrace the open and tolerant values of US society.”

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But while Miller is technically correct about there being no explicit religious test in the order, it is also true that the original order included prioritizations for refugees from “religious minorities”. Since all the countries indicated by the order are majority Muslim, those exceptions essentially allowed officials to consider processing entry for any citizen of the seven nations who was not Muslim.

Later in the month, during a town hall event, Miller said the revised executive order the administration was drafting was intended to address the specific complaints that the judges raised with the order, but not alter its intent – a fact that civil rights groups leading the inevitable challenges against the new order in court are likely to latch on to.

“One of the big differences that you are going to see in the executive order is that it is going to be responsive to the judicial ruling which didn’t exist previously,” Miller said at the town hall. “And so these are mostly minor, technical differences. Fundamentally, you are still going to have the same, basic policy outcome for the country.”