President Trump ’s travel ban is both legal and constitutional, the Supreme Court ruled Tuesday, reversing a series of anti- Trump decisions by lower courts…
President Trump ’s travel ban is both legal and constitutional, the Supreme Court ruled Tuesday, reversing a series of anti- Trump decisions by lower courts and delivering a landmark win for the White House.
The 5-4 decision recognizes Mr. Trump has broad powers to block foreigners from entering the U. S., giving the administration a boost as it tries to fend off myriad lawsuits over its get-tough immigration policies.
And the court refused to hold Mr. Trump ’s tweets and other campaign-era anti-Muslim comments against him now that he’s in office, saying judges usually take the president’s actions on their face. They ruled the travel ban was facially neutral, not the “Muslim ban” his critics had said.
“The text says nothing about religion,” Chief Justice John G Roberts Jr. wrote for the majority.
Trump critics were enraged, with one saying the ruling would go down as among the worst the high court has ever issued.
In the immediate term it means the government may continue to severely restrict entry of citizens of seven countries Mr. Trump and his Cabinet deemed to be uncooperative in sharing information on their travelers.
But the ruling also has major implications for the ongoing immigration debates, finding that Congress has clear powers to deny entry to foreigners, and it gave the president wide latitude to exercise those powers.
Mr. Trump was “squarely within the scope” of his authority in issuing the travel ban, and gave a sufficient description of his reasons for doing so, the court ruled.
“Under these circumstances, the government has set forth a sufficient national security justification to survive rational basis review. We express no view on the soundness of the policy,” the chief justice wrote. “We simply hold today that plaintiffs have not demonstrated a likelihood of success on the merits of their constitutional claim.”
The court ’s four Democratic-appointed justices dissented, comparing the decision to some of the darkest rulings of the court ’s past, such as ruling upholding internment of Japanese Americans during World War II.
Justice Sonia Sotomayor also said Mr. Trump ’s tweets and his campaign statements should be used against him, saying a clear line can be drawn from his campaign-era proposal for a “total and complete shutdown of Muslims entering the United States” to the travel ban policies.
“Taking all the relevant evidence together, a reasonable observer would conclude that the proclamation was driven primarily by anti-Muslim animus,” she wrote.
Chief Justice Roberts countered that just 8 percent of the world’s Muslim population lives in the countries affected. He also pointed out Mr. Trump had relied on countries singled out by the Obama administration and Congress in drawing up his list, suggesting it wasn’t the president’s feelings that motivated the specific policy.
Still, Mr. Trump ’s rhetoric did appear to trouble even some of the justices who upheld the travel policy.
Justice Anthony M. Kennedy, who signed onto the majority opinion, wrote a separate concurring opinion saying that while the courts can’t necessarily police all of the words of government officials, they should be careful not to go too far.
“An anxious world must know that our government remains committed always to the liberties the Constitution seeks to preserve and protect, so that freedom extends outward, and lasts,” he wrote.
The decision was a massive win for the White House, which had assured supporters all along that its moves were legal — even as lower courts ruled against the president in case after case.
The decision is a rebuke of sorts to those judges, mostly Democratic-appointed, who found myriad reasons to rule against the president, on everything from his Twitter account to what they saw as a lack of thorough justification.
The current policy is the third iteration of the travel ban.
Mr. Trump announced the first one by executive order a week after his inauguration, creating chaos at airports as migrants from the then-seven countries subjected to the ban arrived, and were turned back.
Immigrant-rights advocates ran to the courts and earned an immediate halt to the policy, launching the last 17 months of litigation.
Mr. Trump first revised his policy in March 2017, cutting Iraq out of the original list of banned countries and issuing more narrow restrictions, as well as laying out a more thorough justification for why the policy was necessary.
While some courts upheld that policy as a valid exercise of presidential authority, others ruled it still violated constitutional rights of Americans and legal immigrants who deserved to have foreign relatives, business associates and others be able to visit them here run the U. S.
The Supreme Court last June weighed in, overturning some of the lower court blockades and allowing parts of that ban to go into effect.
Mr. Trump then issued another revision last fall, updating the list so that it now covers North Korea and Venezuela, two non-majority Muslim countries, as well as Chad. Sudan was dropped from the list.
Yemen, Syria, Libya, Iran and Somalia remained on the list.
Chad would be dropped from the list in April of this year.
