President Donald Trump’s controversial travel ban takes effect Thursday. | AP Photo Grandparents blocked by Trump travel ban guidelines

People from six majority-Muslim countries with “close family” in the United States, such as parents or siblings, can still get U.S. visas even as President Donald Trump’s controversial travel ban takes effect Thursday — but having grandparents, aunts or uncles here won’t help.

The administration issued new travel guidelines Thursday after the Supreme Court earlier this week allowed it to partially enforce Trump’s executive order barring visitors from Iran, Libya, Somalia, Sudan, Syria and Yemen.


The court will hear arguments later this year on the legality of the order, which halts the issuance of new visas to travelers from the six nations for 90 days and suspends the refugee resettlement program for 120 days. The White House says the rules are necessary to prevent terrorism, even as critics say it's a thinly veiled effort to keep Muslims from entering the country.

The ban's restart came as a victory for the Trump administration, and it appears unlikely the United States will see a repeat of the airport chaos that occurred after the White House first issued its travel ban in January (the order was later revised to make it easier to defend in court).

But the court's decision nonetheless created a new set of potential legal landmines because the justices carved out an exception for people with a "bona fide relationship" to a person or organization in the United States. The administration has spent the past several days grappling with how to interpret that vaguely worded exemption.

They determined that travelers from nations named in the ban would still be eligible for U.S. visas if they have a parent, parent-in-law, spouse, child, adult son or daughter, son-in-law, daughter-in-law, sibling, or half sibling, including step relationships, Secretary of State Rex Tillerson wrote in a cable sent Thursday to State Department consular officials around the world.

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But the cable, obtained by POLITICO and first reported by the Associated Press , stated that “close family” did not include grandparents, grandchildren, aunts, uncles, nieces, nephews, cousins, brothers-in-law and sisters-in-law, and any other “extended” family members.

The administration appeared to reverse course on one group. In the State Department cable and later on the department website, fiancés were among those denied special consideration to circumvent the ban. By Thursday night, however, the website had been updated to include fiancés as close family.

The exclusions, however, could prompt pushback from people seeking to visit or live with more distant relatives.

“I think that’s wrong," said Sen. Ben Cardin (D-Md.), a critic of the ban. "I think the directive that’s been given tries to cut back on what the Supreme Court intended. So I didn’t agree with the Supreme Court’s restrictions to start off with, but I think the way the administration is implementing it is wrong.”

Refugee admissions could be especially tricky under the administration's guidelines. The Supreme Court said people with ties to businesses or other U.S. organizations could still be eligible for visas, but a senior administration official told reporters Thursday that a refugee’s connection to a resettlement agency would not by itself be a sufficient link.

The official, who declined to be named, estimated that roughly half of refugees have a relative in the U.S., but it was not clear how many of those relationships meet the new criteria.

The official said that as of Wednesday night, the U.S. had already admitted 49,009 refugees, essentially fulfilling the quota of 50,000 for the year. But the Supreme Court said that cap could not be used to block refugees with clear family or business ties from coming to the United States.

When the ban takes effect at 8 p.m. Thursday, it appears unlikely travelers will experience the confusion and distress that accompanied the hasty roll-out of the initial travel ban over a weekend in late January, when people already in the air suddenly saw their permission to enter the United States revoked and green-card holders wondered whether their documents would remain valid.

Under the terms of the revised executive order issued in March, lawful permanent residents and people with valid visas will be allowed to enter the country. A senior official said Thursday that refugees who have booked travel through July 6 would be exempted from the ban, too.

Still, it was possible some people in the six affected countries might remain unaware of the changes. A senior administration official said guidance would be posted to the State Department’s website and that foreign posts would be instructed to use the public information to develop instructions for people in each respective country.

Lawyers and advocates are expected to monitor airports around the country as the policy moves ahead tonight and over the weekend. One former Homeland Security official at the department during the roll-out of the first iteration of the ban said the new approach showed signs of improvement.

“I think that folks were a little bit more prepared for it now,” the former official said. “I don’t think we’ll see what we saw the last time in terms of complete disarray in the airports, but I don’t know.”

Seung Min Kim contributed to this report.