President Donald Trump's second stab at a travel ban executive order will redraw the battle lines in the legal war his first order set off about a month ago, turning the focus to a small number of lawsuits aimed at the new order's continued moratorium on refugees entering the U.S.

The new order carves out the most legally vulnerable aspects of the original directive by eliminating its application to existing visa holders, whether they're currently in the U.S. or overseas. Now, those most directly affected will be individuals from six countries — Iran, Libya, Somalia, Sudan, Syria and Yemen — applying for visas for the first time. They face a delay of at least 90 days while new vetting processes are developed.


Legal experts say the changes put the ban on firmer legal footing in the courts.

"This will definitely be a more difficult constitutional target," said Temple University law professor Peter Spiro. "To the extent it applies only to prospective visa applicants, they're sort of on the lowest rung of a ladder that's already pretty low. The executive has pretty broad authority in general in the immigration context and the authority is at its broadest with respect to noncitizens who have never entered the U.S."

However, the administration's tailoring of the new order doesn't eliminate the risk that one or more judges will agree to put the new one on hold.

"It's definitely a harder case. Does it mean it's a sure loser? No," Spiro said.

So far, most of the media attention has been devoted to early lawsuits in Boston, New York, Seattle and Alexandria, Virginia, that focused mainly on the initial travel ban's impact on green card holders and visa holders. Now, with the revised order leaving in place a 120-day halt to admission of refugees, other suits may get their moment in the spotlight, such as one filed in Greenbelt, Maryland, last month by refugee aid groups.

Becca Heller of the International Refugee Assistance Project said her group plans to ask the judge to block Trump's new order before it is set to take effect next Thursday.

"We'll be amending our complaint and seeking emergency relief," Heller said. "To me, not much has changed. It's nice that people with visas get to keep their visas ... This is just an indication of why we need multiple legal challenges."

Moves to block Trump's new order are likely to play out in courts across the country over the next 10 days, before the new order kicks in. After the new directive was issued, one judge in the nation's capital handling a suit brought by Iranian-American groups canceled a hearing set for next week and ordered the two sides to come up with a new schedule in the case.

Lawyers who filed suits against the earlier ban offered somewhat divergent responses Monday to Trump's new order. Immigrant advocacy groups immediately denounced the directive, while lawyers for the states that obtained court rulings against the earlier order celebrated Trump's concessions.

"The bottom line is the president capitulated on numerous key provisions ... On those key provisions, this is a very significant victory," Washington state Attorney General Bob Ferguson crowed at a news conference in Seattle, where he argued that Trump's famous "SEE YOU IN COURT!" tweet proved to be pure bluster. "The president was essentially afraid to see us in court because he knew he would lose again."

Virginia Attorney General Mark Herring's statement had a similar air of triumph.

"This pared-down order is an incredible concession from President Trump that all but concedes the significant constitutional and practical flaws that the courts and I saw in his original ban," Herring said.

Attorney General Jeff Sessions insisted that the revisions did not amount to an admission that any part of the original order was unwise or unconstitutional.

"The Department of Justice believes that this executive order, just as the first executive order, is a lawful and proper exercise of presidential authority," Sessions said during an appearance before reporters Monday where he did not take questions.

"We 100 percent maintain that the executive order as initially drafted is completely constitutional and legal," White House press secretary Sean Spicer told reporters later in the day.

Both state attorneys general said they were studying the new order and might pursue further legal challenges. However, immigrant advocates stressed their objections to the order, which they quickly sought to label as the "Muslim Ban 2.0."

"The Trump administration has conceded that its original Muslim ban was indefensible. Unfortunately, it has replaced it with a scaled-back version that shares the same fatal flaws," said Omar Jadwat of the American Civil Liberties Union, which is involved in more than half the pending suits.

The redrafting of the executive appears to have been aimed primarily at overcoming the objections laid out in a 9th Circuit Court of Appeals opinion last month that declined to disturb Seattle-based U.S. District Court Judge James Robart's restraining order against the key parts of the original Trump travel ban directive. That could complicate that appeal and might result in the earlier 9th Circuit ruling being set aside while new proceedings take place before Robart.

However, the rewrite appears to do less to effect the conclusion of Alexandria-based Judge Leonie Brinkema, who held in the suit brought by the state of Virginia that the original order was infected by unconstitutional religious prejudice. Nevertheless, the preliminary injunction she granted aided only Virginia residents and others with ties to the state who already have visas or green cards. The DOJ argued in a court filing Monday that her injunction is simply inapplicable to the new order since it excludes those groups.

The order does make one major concession to claims of religious bias: it drops a portion of the earlier order that would give Christians an advantage in the refugee admissions process.

Still, comments by various administration officials trying to minimize the differences between the old and new order seem certain to fuel continued claims that the new order stems from anti-Muslim sentiment.

"If you think about it, the principles of the executive order remain the same," Spicer said during his briefing for journalists. "We recognized that we could have been in litigation for up to a year on this, and that would have left the country exposed."

Heller noted that although Trump administration officials denied the new order was a version of the "Muslim ban" Trump promised during the presidential contest, his campaign sent a fundraising email Monday that touted the new order as part of the fight against "radical Islamic terrorism."

Critics say Trump's campaign rhetoric amounts to a kind of original sin that no number of redrafts will wash away.

"I feel like the constitutional case is still pretty strong. When you're looking at religious discrimination, what matters is intent," Heller said.

Spiro said the revisions to the order improve its legal chances significantly if judges simply look at the text of the order, but because of Trump's inflammatory rhetoric and the ham-handed deployment of the earlier order, they will take a broader and more skeptical view of the new directive.

"If this were the first time around, I'd say this order would be close to a slam dunk. But it's not the first time around," the professor said. "Judges aren't stupid. They read the newspaper and will see it for what it is."