Chris Geidner/BuzzFeed Protests outside the Supreme Court following the travel ban decision June 26.

The Supreme Court on Tuesday upheld President Donald Trump's travel ban. "We express no view on the soundness of the policy," Chief Justice John Roberts wrote for the court's 5–4 conservative majority — while upholding Trump's third attempt at barring entry to those people from countries deemed by the administration to have insufficient vetting procedures to ensure that national security concerns are addressed. In the decision, Roberts wrote that Trump had authority under the Immigration and Nationality Act to issue the September 2017 proclamation to "suspend entry of aliens into the United States." The court went on to hold that challengers to the ban also were unlikely to succeed in their claim that the proclamation violates the Establishment Clause. The decision is a victory for the Trump administration, but it only came after multiple court rulings on the two prior iterations of the travel ban significantly altered — or, "watered down," as Trump himself said — the policy. The ruling Tuesday was only on the third version of the ban, a more narrow proclamation that followed a process of review involving the Homeland Security, State, and Justice departments. The administration withdrew the earlier versions of the ban before the Supreme Court was able to hear the merits of the administration’s arguments on those orders.

Justice Sonia Sotomayor harshly criticized the decision — spending more than 15 minutes reading from her dissent on the bench Tuesday. In doing so, she compared the decision to the 1944 Supreme Court decision in Korematsu v. US upholding the internment camps used to detain people of Japanese ancestry during World War II. The court, however, used the travel ban case to refute — and overturn — that earlier case. "Korematsu was gravely wrong the day it was decided, has been overruled in the court of history, and — to be clear — 'has no place in law under the Constitution,'" Roberts wrote, quoting from Justice Robert Jackson's dissent to the 1944 decision. For Sotomayor, that was only half of the issue. "This formal repudiation of a shameful precedent is laud­able and long overdue. But it does not make the majority’s decision here acceptable or right," she wrote, concluding that "the Court redeploys the same dangerous logic underlying Korematsu and merely replaces one 'gravely wrong' decision with another."

She was joined in her dissent by Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg. (Justice Stephen Breyer wrote his own dissent, joined by Justice Elena Kagan.)

Kevin Lamarque / Reuters

Roberts, in the court's opinion, disclaimed the Korematsu comparison, writing that "it is wholly inapt to liken that morally repugnant order to a facially neutral policy denying certain foreign nationals the privilege of admission." In addressing the challenge under the INA — an argument that Trump had gone too far under the law — Roberts wrote that the challengers' "request for a searching inquiry into the persuasiveness of the President’s justifications is inconsistent with the broad statutory text and the deference traditionally accorded the President in this sphere." The law gives the president the ability to bar entry of a "class of aliens," and Roberts wrote that phrasing "comfortably encompasses a group of people linked by nationality." The court also tossed aside an argument from the challengers that a nondiscrimination provision in the INA limits the president's actions. The provisions, Roberts wrote, "operate in different spheres" — the president's ability to bar entry relates to admissibility, whereas the nondiscrimination provision simply relates to the issuance of visas. "Had Congress instead intended in [the nondiscrimination provision] to constrain the President’s power to determine who may enter the country, it could easily have chosen language directed to that end," Roberts wrote, ultimately concluding, "The Proclamation is squarely within the scope of Presidential authority under the INA." Regarding the Establishment Clause challenge — the argument that the ban was motivated by anti-Muslim animus — the court detailed some of the statements and tweets from Trump and his advisers that challengers pointed to as reasons for finding an anti-Muslim bias behind the ban. Roberts wrote that the issue before the court "is not whether to denounce the statement," but instead, "the significance of those statements in reviewing a Presidential directive, neutral on its face, addressing a matter within the core of executive responsibility" — specifically "a national security directive regulating the entry of aliens abroad." To that, he said, the court "must consider not only the statements of a particular President, but also the authority of the Presidency itself." The court "assume[d]" that it could look beyond the text of the policy to determine "whether the entry policy is plausibly related to the Government’s stated objective to protect the country and improve vetting processes." The court found "persuasive evidence that the entry suspension has a legitimate grounding in national security concerns, quite apart from any religious hostility," Roberts wrote, concluding that "the Government has set forth a sufficient national security justification to survive rational basis review." Trump was unsurprisingly happy about the decision, reacting with a "Wow!" to the news on Twitter.



SUPREME COURT UPHOLDS TRUMP TRAVEL BAN. Wow!