A federal appeals court has ruled against reinstating Donald Trump’s revised travel ban – marking yet another major setback for the administration’s attempts to curb immigration from six Muslim majority countries.
The Virginia-based fourth circuit of appeals on Thursday upheld a March ruling from a Maryland district court, which found grounds that the ban violated the equal protection clause of the US constitution.
The revised ban has also been blocked with an even broader injunction by a federal court in Hawaii, meaning the administration has been fighting in two separate appeals courts.
As the ninth circuit has yet to rule on the Hawaii decision, even if the fourth circuit had ruled in favour of the Trump administration the president would not have been able to implement the ban.
Trump has previously vowed to fight the case to the end, meaning it will now likely end up in the supreme court.
Trump’s revised order, which temporarily barred new visas from Libya, Somalia, Sudan, Iran, Yemen and Syria, as well as suspending the US refugee resettlement program, was a streamlined version of a ban issued in January that was chaotically ruled out and blocked by federal courts across the country.
The administration had argued it was necessary to protect American national security, but lawyers for the American Civil Liberties Union, who brought the case in Maryland, argued that comments made by Trump and members of his campaign during the 2016 election, highlighted the ban was designed to discriminate against Muslims.
In December 2015, Trump pledged to implement a “total and complete shutdown” of Muslims entering the US, and went on to repeat the pledge throughout the presidential election campaign. The day after the new president announced the first travel ban in January, the former New York City mayor and top Trump surrogate, Rudy Giuliani, told Fox News he had been asked by the president to find “the right way to do it legally”.
“I’ll tell you the whole history of it: When he first announced it, he said ‘Muslim ban’,” Giuliani said. “He called me up, he said, ‘Put a commission together, show me the right way to do it legally’.”
Following the announcement of the revised order in March, White House press secretary Sean Spicer told reporters that the “principles” of the second ban “remain the same”.
During arguments earlier in May lawyers seized on all of these comments as evidence of the executive order’s animus towards Muslims. In the majority opinion issued on Thursday, the fourth circuit’s chief judge, Roger Gregory, also referred to them frequently.
“The evidence in the record, viewed from the standpoint of the reasonable observer, creates a compelling case that EO-2’s [Executive Order Two] primary purpose is religious. Then-candidate Trump’s campaign statements reveal that on numerous occasions, he expressed anti-Muslim sentiment, as well as his intent, if elected, to ban Muslims from the United States,” Gregory wrote.
(TheGuardian US)
