WASHINGTON ― Opponents of President Donald Trump’s executive order banning refugees and certain foreign travelers believe the administration repeatedly delaying its release of an update version only prove what they’ve said all along: The order was slapdash and unnecessary.

They received ammunition this week when an administration official reportedly told CNN that the release of a new executive order would be pushed back because Trump’s joint address to Congress was so well-received.

“If the administration genuinely believed that the ban is urgently needed to protect national security, then one would assume they would not delay issuing a new order for political reasons,” Lee Gelernt, an American Civil Liberties Union attorney who is leading the travel ban challenge in Brooklyn federal court, told The Huffington Post in an email. “But, as national security experts from both parties have stated, a ban is not the way to protect the country, and is in fact, counterproductive.”

One week into his presidency, Trump signed an executive order he said was necessary to prevent terrorists and other people intending to harm Americans from entering the country. The order barred nationals of seven Muslim-majority nations for 90 days, all refugees for 120 days and Syrian refugees indefinitely.

The Trump administration announced plans for a new order in mid-February and told the public and reporters to expect it last week. That timeline keeps changing. First, officials said the new order was likely to drop Wednesday of this week, then pushed the expected release to next week, likely Monday. They have since said the order won’t be released until next week at the earliest, The Associated Press reported Thursday afternoon.

Lawyers for the Department of Justice have told the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 9th Circuit, which is further considering the legality of the initial order, to hold off on moving forward with the case. “The President intends in the near future to rescind the Order and replace it with a new, substantially revised Executive Order,” they said.

That “near future” seems to have come and gone, and the 9th Circuit responded Monday by denying the government’s request to delay the appeal. The court gave the Trump administration until March 10 to file its opening brief explaining why the travel ban should be reinstated.

A White House official told HuffPost that it was inaccurate to say the new executive order, meant to replace the travel ban blocked in the courts more than a month ago, had been delayed because the date was never formally announced.

But White House officials told reporters this week that they had planned for a Wednesday signing day ― and those plans changed after Trump delivered his joint address to Congress, indicating the decision was at least in part because the president had received positive feedback on the speech.

“We want the [executive order] to have its own ‘moment,’” one official said, according to CNN.

Axios reported a similar comment from a “top aide,” who also reportedly said officials were making final tweaks to the order’s language to make sure they got it right this time.

“For once, we had the wind at our sails,” the aide told Axios, referring to the accolades Trump received in response to his speech. “We decided not to sh*t on ourselves.”

That’s not to say the administration isn’t taking the redrafting seriously. Officials are reportedly considering tweaks to address concerns about the first executive order, such as officially exempting green card holders and removing Iraq from the list of seven countries whose citizens are banned.

Some opponents of the original ban suggest that the administration may be taking a long time to draft a new and improved executive order because officials can’t quite figure out how to carry out the president’s goals in a way that would hold up in court.

The “repeated delays demonstrate just how difficult it will be for the president to craft a constitutional order,” said Washington State Attorney General Bob Ferguson. He spearheaded the lawsuit that led to the nationwide injunction that kept the travel ban from being enforced.

“Nearly four weeks have passed since I obtained an injunction halting President Trump’s hastily-issued, unconstitutional and illegal executive order,” he said in an email. “That’s four times as long as it took his administration to rush that initial order out the door, citing urgent national security concerns.”

The entire process of redrafting a travel ban seems like more evidence the executive order wasn’t necessary in the first place, said Marielena Hincapié, executive director of the National Immigration Law Center, which was part of the Brooklyn lawsuit suit ― one of the first filed against the initial order.

“You would think if it were such a necessity for our national security and our safety that they would have issued something quickly,” Hincapié said. “But now delaying it because his approval ratings are increasing and they don’t want his approval ratings to drop again ... undermines their arguments that this is actually necessary for national security.”

Elise Foley reported from Washington. Cristian Farias reported from New York.