One of President Donald Trump's most controversial campaign promises was to establish a ban on Muslims entering the United States.

Whether that was the intention of a series of executive orders after he took office is widely debated. But it is clear that the orders impeded the entry of Muslims from some countries, though not from all parts of the world.

About a week after taking office, Trump signed an executive order temporarily suspending immigration from seven Muslim-majority nations and the U.S. refugee program. He indefinitely stopped the entry of Syrian refugees. Courts blocked the order's implementation after states sued alleging it violated constitutional religious liberties.

Trump subsequently signed two more executive orders, each a revision of the previous one, in response to multiple lawsuits challenging their legality. Opponents of the orders said they amounted to a Muslim ban. The Trump administration argued they were not banning immigration based on religion, and were rather driven by national security concerns.

Ultimately, in June 2018, the U.S. Supreme Court upheld the third version of the travel ban in a 5-4 decision. That version restricted the entry of nationals of Iran, Libya, Somalia, Syria, Yemen, North Korea and Venezuela.

U.S. Supreme Court Chief Justice John Roberts wrote the court's majority opinion, saying Trump's directive was "facially neutral toward religion."

"The proclamation is expressly premised on legitimate purposes: preventing entry of nationals who cannot be adequately vetted and inducing other nations to improve their practices," Roberts wrote. "The text says nothing about religion."

Although five of the seven nations in the order have Muslim-majority populations, "that fact alone does not support an inference of religious hostility," Roberts added, saying that the policy covered 8 percent of the world's Muslim population and was limited to countries previously designated by Congress or other administrations as posing national security risks.

In a dissenting opinion, Associate Justice Sonia Sotomayor pointed out remarks Trump made during his campaign and after the election, including Trump's December 2015 statement calling for "a total and complete shutdown of Muslims entering the United States until our country's representatives can figure out what the hell is going on."

"Taking all the relevant evidence together, a reasonable observer would conclude that the proclamation was driven primarily by anti-Muslim animus, rather than by the government's asserted national-security justifications," Sotomayor wrote.

Trump's order is "not a total ban on people of the Muslim faith," but it does curtail their entry, said Betsy Fisher, policy director for the International Refugee Assistance Project at the Urban Justice Center, which represents refugees in immigration proceedings.

While the majority of people banned under Trump's order are Muslim, "there is little if any evidence indicating that their exclusion protects national security," Ilya Somin, a law professor at George Mason University and an adjunct scholar at the libertarian Cato Institute, wrote after the Supreme Court ruling.

Our ruling

Trump promised a "total and complete shutdown" of Muslims entering the United States. His executive orders accomplished substantially less — ultimately only restricting the entry of people from five Muslim-majority nations.

The Trump administration argues it is not a ban based on religion, but on national security concerns. Many disagree, saying that the executive orders were watered-down versions of Trump's Muslim ban promise. The U.S. Supreme Court in a 5-4 decision upheld Trump's directive.

The motivation behind the orders is widely debated. But what ultimately got through was not the sweeping religious ban that Trump advocated during his presidential primary. We rate this Promise Broken.