Licking their wounds after a stinging appeals court defeat, President Donald Trump’s aides went into triage mode Friday as they considered options for salvaging his contested travel ban for citizens of seven majority-Muslim countries.

In two different venues Friday afternoon, Trump suggested that the White House is trying to redraft the order to strengthen it against legal challenges, which he expects the administration to continue to fight in court.


“We’ll be doing something very rapidly having to do with additional security for our country,” Trump said during a White House news conference with Japanese Prime Minister Shinzo Abe. “You'll be seeing that sometime in the next week. In addition, we will continue to go through the court process and, ultimately, I have no doubt that we’ll win that particular case.”

Later in the day, as he flew to Florida for the weekend along with the Japanese leader, Trump spoke again of the legal fight and acknowledged that a new executive order aimed at protecting Americans from terrorism is a live possibility.

"We will win that battle. The unfortunate part is that it takes time statutorily, but we will win that battle. We also have a lot of other options, including just filing a brand new order," Trump said during an exchange with pool reporters on board Air Force One.

Asked whether such an order would be forthcoming, the president said: "It very well could be. We need speed for reasons of security, so it very well could be." The new directive could come Monday or Tuesday, Trump added.

“We will be extreme vetting,” Trump vowed during his White House news conference. “We will not allow people into our country who are looking to do harm to our people.”

Trump could ask the Supreme Court to step in and do what a three-judge panel of the 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals refused to do Thursday: allow him to reinstate his original executive order. However, the president said nothing publicly Friday about taking the issue to the justices.

The appeals court added its own twist to the legal saga Friday afternoon, announcing that one of its judges requested a vote of the full bench on whether the order issued Thursday turning down Trump's request should be reconsidered by an 11-judge panel.

Chief Judge Sidney Thomas ordered lawyers for the two sides in the case — the Justice Department and the states of Washington and Minnesota — to file briefs by Thursday indicating whether they support such a rehearing.

To win a rehearing, the Trump administration will need a majority of the active judges voting. In that group, Democratic appointees outnumber GOP judicial picks, 18-7.

However, even a denial of further review would allow other 9th Circuit judges the chance to publicly opine on the court's order issued Thursday, potentially bolstering Trump's public arguments that his order is legal.

A White House official who asked not to be named said officials were keeping all their options on the table.

“We are reviewing every single option in the court system, including a Supreme Court appeal on the temporary restraining order, and are confident we will prevail on the merits of the case. Additionally, we are actively pursuing other Executive Orders that will keep our country safe from terrorism. These Executive Orders will be signed very soon,” the official said.

Another top White House official said the administration would keep pursuing the matter "aggressively" in court, but didn't offer further specifics.

Trump’s controversial executive order, signed Jan. 27, banned travel to the U.S. by citizens of seven Muslim-majority countries and suspending the admission of refugees from across the globe. It was put on ice last week by a federal judge in Seattle, a ruling that the 9th Circuit upheld on Thursday.

During a hearing Friday morning in federal court in Virginia on one of more than 20 lawsuits attacking Trump's order, a federal government lawyer said no decision had been made about how to respond to the unanimous ruling from the three-judge appeals court panel.

“We may appeal. We may not. We may take other action,” Justice Department attorney Erez Reuveni said. “All options are being considered.”

The Virginia hearing was another vivid illustration of the difficulties the Trump administration has encountered in court as it seeks to defend the president’s travel ban order, which sought to halt travel from Iran, Iraq, Libya, Somalia, Sudan, Syria and Yemen, among other steps. The president has repeatedly said the directive was intended to prevent any possibility of terrorist acts from such travelers, as well as refugees, even though such episodes are exceedingly rare.

U.S. District Court Judge Leonie Brinkema pleaded with federal government lawyers to provide some factual evidence to support the order or explain how it addressed a real threat.

“The courts have been begging you to give some information supporting a rational justification [that the targeted countries pose] a unique threat,” the judge said. “You haven’t given us any evidence whatsoever.”

Justice Department attorneys have argued that the national security issues involved in Trump’s decision should not be the province of the courts, but Brinkema — who handled the trial of Sept. 11 plotter Zacarias Moussaoui — dismissed that contention.

“We have national security matters presented to us all the time. The courts are cleared” to handle them, the judge said. “I don't have a scintilla of evidence from the government.”

At Friday’s hearing, Reuveni took a more nuanced position than in other cases, arguing that the courts could entertain constitutional challenges from specific travelers but should not delve into the president’s broad national security judgments. Doing that would risk a “constitutional conflict between the branches of the highest order,” he warned.

But Brinkema said giving no scrutiny at all to the president’s conclusions would preclude the courts from reviewing even the most bizarre edicts. “What would happen if the president decided red-headed people pose a threat to the United States?” she asked.

Virginia Solicitor General Stuart Raphael gave an even more jarring example, suggesting that the federal government’s approach would allow the president to order that certain foreigners in the U.S. wear a “yellow Star of David or crescent on their clothes.”

Raphael urged Brinkema to implement her own nationwide preliminary injunction against Trump’s order. He said it was obvious the measure was intended to follow through on Trump’s campaign-trail promises to block Muslims from the U.S.

“The evidence is overwhelming that this is the way the president effected the Muslim ban,” the top Virginia state lawyer said.

Brinkema sounded inclined to issue some sort of injunction, although she did not tip her hand about whether it would cover foreigners across the U.S. or be limited to those with Virginia ties. She said she would rule “soon, but not overnight.”

Trump rarely backs down from a fight, but even before Thursday’s appeals court ruling there were signs that the White House might not proceed as originally expected with an emergency application to the Supreme Court. Legal experts said it was doubtful Trump could muster what he’d need to get immediate relief there: the votes of five justices on the high court, which remains shorthanded with only eight justices. A 4-4 deadlock would leave in place the ruling suspending enforcement of Trump’s ban.

In comments immediately after Thursday’s ruling, Trump and his aides refrained from any talk of taking the case to the Supreme Court. Instead, they painted the 9th Circuit ruling as a procedural ruling and said they looked forward to having the case for the executive order heard on “the merits” in lower courts.

Several prominent legal experts are encouraging Trump to withdraw his current order and redraft it. That might alleviate some of the legal pressure, but it would not simply do away with the raft of lawsuits pending in federal courts from Boston to Los Angeles.

“I think there would some confusion in the lower courts about what to do with these cases,” said Steve Vladeck, a law professor at the University of Texas at Austin.

Lawyers pressing the cases have repeatedly said they would not regard a suspension in enforcement of parts of the order as mooting the litigation seeking relief. Long-established court doctrines say someone engaged in wrongful conduct cannot shut down a case just by pledging to refrain from the activity in question.

After the order led to travel disruption, delays and detentions for hundreds of green-card holders, the White House sought to resolve that problem through a series of moves that did not involve Trump modifying his order. The latest move on that front was a memo from White House counsel Don McGahn purporting to offer “authoritative guidance” that Trump’s directive does not appeal to green-card holders.

The White House said that should eliminate all doubt about the order affecting permanent U.S. residents, but the appeals court said in its ruling Thursday that McGahn’s statement was entitled to no legal weight.

“There’s no clean way out of this at this point,” Vladeck said.

Annie Karni contributed to this report from West Palm Beach, Fla.