A federal judge in Hawaii has said he will rule on Wednesday on whether to halt Donald Trump’s revised immigration ban before it takes effect at 12.01am.

US district judge Derrick Watson is one of several judges hearing arguments over the ban in the final hours before its implementation. He said on Wednesday afternoon after hearing oral arguments that he would issue a written ruling before 6pm Hawaii time. Hawaii was the first state to challenge the second version of Trump’s travel ban, after the first was halted by court order.

The state has argued that the ban is unconstitutional, and that it will suffer damage to its local economy and to various educational and religious institutions. It also argued that some Hawaiians will be prevented from reuniting with family members swept up in the ban.

Earlier on Wednesday, Theodore Chuang, a US district court judge, sharply questioned attorneys for the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) and the National Immigration Law Center, who are pushing for the ban to be blocked, as well as the government attorney defending it, but gave no indication on how he would rule or even if he would do so before Thursday morning.

Chuang, a former deputy general counsel for the Department of Homeland Security, seemed hesitant to interfere with what the administration is calling a national security issue, something courts have traditionally not done, but he did appear to mull the argument presented by the plaintiffs that Trump’s executive order continues to be a ban on Muslims.

“The entire purpose of the executive order is to disfavor Muslims,” ACLU attorney Omar Jadwat told Chuang. “The government is asking the court to turn a blind eye to what is obvious to everyone.”

Jadwat also argued that Trump’s repeated promises to ban Muslims during the election show the administration’s intent to single out a religious group and should be taken into account when looking at the revised plan which, he said, is a thinly veiled attempt to keep Muslims from immigrating to the US.

The government’s attorney, deputy solicitor general Jeffrey Wall, told the judge that Trump’s campaign vows became irrelevant once he took the oath of office on 20 January. Trump, he said, has not used similar rhetoric as president.

Although after the first version of Trump’s immigration order was signed the president said “this is not a Muslim ban”, in an interview the day it was introduced he said that persecuted Christians should be given priority to enter the US, saying with reference to Syrian refugees: “If you were a Muslim you could come in, but if you were a Christian, it was almost impossible and the reason that was so unfair – everybody was persecuted, in all fairness – but they were chopping off the heads of everybody but more so the Christians. And I thought it was very, very unfair. So we are going to help them.”

Trump’s plan – a revision of that earlier executive order, which was blocked in federal court – keeps refugees from entering the US for 120 days and has a three-month suspension of visas to citizens of Yemen, Sudan, Syria, Libya, Somalia and Iran. Though the new order dropped Iraq from the list of countries and does not provide for religious preferences, opponents say it remains a Muslim ban cloaked in different language.



Another US district judge, James Robart, who issued the nationwide temporary restraining order against Trump’s first ban, will also hear arguments in another case in Seattle on Wednesday afternoon at 5pm ET. Brought by the advocacy group Northwest Immigrants Rights Project, the case is similar to the Maryland and Hawaii cases.

The temporary restraining order issued by Robart against the first travel ban was upheld in a unanimous verdict in the federal appeals court in February. That case was brought by the state of Washington who, along with a coalition of other Democratic states, have filed a revised complaint against Trump’s new order. There has been no court date set for this case.

The Maryland challenge was filed by the International Refugee Assistance Project and HIAS, who represent several refugees they say are in limbo by the ban or are in imminent danger because of the executive order. The plaintiffs are unnamed and were not in court because many are US citizens trying to bring in family members who are trapped in covered countries.

Attorneys told of an Iranian same-sex fiance of an American man who could be prosecuted or attacked if he is unable to leave that country as he expected.

“Many of the plaintiffs will die in the 90 days [that the order covers],” Becca Heller of the International Refugee Assistance Project said later, outside the court.