The 9th United States Circuit Court of Appeals in San Francisco on Monday refused to revive President Donald Trump’s travel ban targeting residents of six Muslim-majority countries, reported Reuters. The Trump administration had appealed to lift the block on the ban imposed by a Hawaiian federal judge. Trump had signed the order on March 6.
“Immigration, even for the President, is not a one-person show,” the court wrote. “The President’s authority is subject to certain statutory and constitutional restraints. We conclude that the President, in issuing the Executive Order, exceeded the scope of the authority delegated to him by Congress.”
The San Francisco court held that Trump’s order went against the existing immigration laws in the US. However, the court, while upholding the Hawaiian judge’s decision to put a stay on the order, removed a part of the injunction and allowed the government to carry out internal reviews on vetting procedures for people from the six countries – Libya, Iran, Somalia, Sudan, Syria and Yemen.
The court further said the order did not explain why the travel ban was needed in the first place. “The order does not offer a sufficient justification to suspend the entry of more than 180 million people on the basis of nationality,” the court said.
A Maryland judge had blocked the travel earlier as well. The decision was also upheld by Virginia-based 4th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals on May 25 as well. The court had said that the 90-day ban on people from the Muslim-majority nations “drips with religious intolerance, animus and discrimination”.
However, the Trump administration has moved the Supreme Court to impose the travel ban. And an approval from the country’s top court will undo the stay on the executive order by lower courts.
On March 6, the US president had signed a executive order imposing a 90-day ban on the entry of people from Iran, Libya, Syria, Somalia, Sudan and Yemen from March 16, leaving Iraq out of the list though it was there on a previous version of the order . However, a federal judge in Hawaiian had blocked the revised travel ban just hours before it was due to come into effect on March 16, a move Trump had called an “unprecedented judicial overreach”.
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