The legal battle over Trump’s revised travel ban continues as justice department defends the president’s authority to ‘protect nation’s security’

This article is more than 3 years old

This article is more than 3 years old

Donald Trump’s administration on Thursday appealed the latest court ruling against his revised travel ban to the same court that refused to reinstate the original version.

A day earlier, the US district judge Derrick Watson in Hawaii handed the government its latest defeat by issuing a longer-lasting hold on Trump’s executive order.

Watson’s decision came after the justice department argued for a narrower ruling covering only the ban on new visas for people from six Muslim-majority countries. The department urged the judge to allow a freeze on the US refugee program to go forward.

A government attorney, Chad Readler, said halting the flow of refugees had no effect on Hawaii and the state had not shown how it would be harmed by the ban. Watson disagreed.

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The administration says the executive order falls within the president’s power to protect national security and will ultimately succeed, while Hawaii’s attorney general, Douglas Chin, likened the revised ban to a neon sign flashing “Muslim ban” that the government hadn’t turned off.

Watson said Hawaii had shown that the ban would harm the state’s universities and tourism industry as well as the imam of a Honolulu mosque, who joined the lawsuit. Ismail Elshikh said the ban would prevent his Syrian mother-in-law from visiting family in the US.

“These injuries have already occurred and will continue to occur if the executive order is implemented and enforced; the injuries are neither contingent nor speculative,” the judge wrote.

Chin told the Associated Press on Thursday that a notable part of the ruling was that the court took into account 20 to 25 statements made by Trump as a candidate and as president and by his surrogates.

“The court will not crawl into a corner, pull the shutters closed, and pretend it has not seen what it has,” Watson wrote.

The justice department said it strongly disagreed with the ruling.

Government attorneys filed documents appealing Watson’s decision to the ninth circuit court of appeals, a move Chin said he had expected.

The judge said his ruling would stay in place until he ordered otherwise and would not be suspended for an appeal.

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The administration said in court documents that the appeal also applied to Watson’s previous temporary block of the travel ban.

“The president’s executive order falls squarely within his lawful authority in seeking to protect our nation’s security, and the department will continue to defend this executive order in the courts,” the department said in a statement.

The president is already appealing a separate case in Maryland. A judge there blocked the six-country travel ban but said it wasn’t clear that the suspension of the refugee program was similarly motivated by religious bias.

The administration wants the fourth circuit court of appeals to put that ruling on hold while it considers the case. The court, based in Richmond, Virginia, will hear arguments 8 May.

If the court sided with Trump, it would not have a direct effect on the Hawaii ruling, legal experts said.

“What a ruling in fourth circuit in favor of the administration would do is create a split in authority between federal courts in different parts of the country,” said Richard Primus, a professor of constitutional law at the University of Michigan law school. “Cases with splits in authority are cases the US supreme court exists to resolve.”

