The Supreme Court granted President Trump a temporary lift on the restrictions on the ban on President’s traveling, upon the Trump administration’s request on Monday.
In the one page order, signed by Justice Anthony Kennedy, the Supreme Court has temporarily rescinded the block that the 9th Circuit Court of Appeals placed on Trump’s so called “Muslim Travel Ban.” As a result, the government can, once again – but only for a limited time – continue to bar dangerous refugees from the U.S. that had received bad or fraudulent assurance from the corrupt Refugee Admissions Program under the Obama Administration.
In the announcement, Kennedy said that some part of the Court’s decision are still pending legal documentation from the Hawaiian judge that made the initial 9th Circuit ruling against Trump. These legal documents are expected to be delivered by Tuesday.
The Supreme Court’s decision came in less than two hours after the Acting Solicitor General, Jeffery Wall, submitted a request for a stay.
The 9th Circuit, in its opinion, also blocked the government from prohibiting extended family members of refugees from entering the country behind individuals who may already be here. However, the Trump administration has signaled that it is not planning on fighting or reversing this aspect of the 9th Circuit’s ruling.
Explaining this decision, Acting Solicitor General Wall said, “Unlike students who have been admitted to study at an American university, workers who have accepted jobs at an American company, and lecturers who come to speak to an American audience, refugees do not have any freestanding connection to resettlement agencies, separate and apart from the refugee-admissions process itself, by virtue of the agencies’ assurance agreement with the government … Nor can the exclusion of an assured refugee plausibly be thought to ‘burden’ a resettlement agency in the relevant sense.”
This legal victory for the Trump administration was only possible because of the legal case that Wall made to the Supreme Court. He argued that allowing the 9th Circuit ruling to move forward without any reinforcements would force the government to “change course” on orders that it had started implementing since June 29th this year and invite “precisely the type of uncertainty and confusion that the government has worked diligently to avoid.”
The Supreme Court also handed Trump a partial win back in June when it allowed the administration to temporarily block people from six terrorist-infested countries from entering the U.S. But the court carved out an exemption for people with direct relatives in the country.
The federal district court judge in Hawaii who blocked the Trump’s order in March exploited the Supreme Court’s ruling by expanding their exemption to everyone in the non-nuclear family. Since enforcement and verification of such relationships is imprecise at best, this means that functionally any terrorist could come into the U.S. under the “refugee” program, if they claim that there is a distant cousin of theirs currently living in the U.S. as well.
