President Donald Trump speaks during a joint session of Congress in Washington DC - © 2017 Bloomberg Finance LP

Hawaii has become the first US state to file a legal challenge to President Donald Trump's revised travel ban.

Mr Trump's new executive order signed this week restricts travel from six predominantly Muslim countries.

In a court filing Hawaii said it would seek a temporary restraining order. The state had taken similar action against Mr Trump's original and more sweeping executive order signed in January.

At a glance | Donald Trump’s immigration ban

Mr Trump's new order keeps a 90-day ban on travel to the US by citizens of Iran, Libya, Syria, Somalia, Sudan and Yemen but exempts Iraq, and applies the restriction only to new visa applicants.

Neal Katyal, a lawyer for Hawaii, said: "To be sure, the new executive order covers fewer people than the old one, but it suffers from the same constitutional and statutory defects."

A spokesman for the US Department of Justice said: "We are confident that the president's actions are lawful to protect the national security of our country."

Legal arguments in the case are expected to be heard on March 15, a day before the new order is set to take effect.

Timeline | Donald Trumps travel ban

Imam Ismail Elshikh of the Muslim Association of Hawaii, a plaintiff in the state's challenge, says the ban will keep his Syrian mother-in-law from visiting.

Mr Trump's "executive order inflicts a grave injury on Muslims in Hawaii, including Dr. Elshikh, his family, and members of his mosque," Hawaii's complaint says.

A federal judge in Seattle issued a temporary restraining order halting the initial ban after Washington state and Minnesota sued. The 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals refused to reinstate the order.

President Donald Trump gestures as he walks down the stairs of Air Force One

While Hawaii is the first to sue to stop the revised ban, the restraining order is still in place and could apply to the new one, too, said Peter Lavalee, a spokesman for the Washington attorney general's office.

Carl Tobias, a University of Richmond Law School professor, said Hawaii's complaint seemed in many ways similar to Washington's successful lawsuit, but whether it would prompt a similar result was tough to say.

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He said he expected the judge, an appointee of President Barack Obama who was a longtime prosecutor, to be receptive to "at least some of it".

Aerial view of Hawaii

Given that the new executive order spells out more of a national security rationale than the old one and allows for some travelers from the six nations to be admitted on a case-by-case basis, it will be harder to show that the new order is intended to discriminate against Muslims, Tobias said.

"The administration's cleaned it up, but whether they have cleaned it up enough I don't know," he said. "It may be harder to convince a judge there's religious animus here."

Prof Tobias also said it was good that Hawaii's lawsuit includes an individual plaintiff, considering that some legal scholars have questioned whether the states themselves have standing to challenge the ban.