“We continue to believe that the order should be allowed to take effect in its entirety,” she said.
The Supreme Court asked this month that both the Ninth and Fourth Circuit courts rule expeditiously to enable it to take up the case. It will likely wait on the Fourth Circuit opinion before it decides whether it will hear the appeal and “finally decide to resolve this issue,” said Carl Tobias, a law professor at the University of Richmond.
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Mariko Hirose, the litigation director for the International Refugee Assistance Project, which is one of the main plaintiffs suing the government in the Fourth Circuit court, said the Ninth Circuit decision was important because “it affirms what the parties have been saying — that this ban is just as unlawful as the prior versions.”
The judges said the ban conflicted with immigration law’s “prohibition on nationality-based discrimination,” and that Mr. Trump had failed to prove that the entry of citizens of certain countries would be detrimental to the United States’ interests. They also said that Congress had already passed laws that kept out individuals with known terrorist activity.
In its latest version of the ban, the Trump administration restricted travel from eight nations, six of them predominantly Muslim. Most citizens of Chad, Iran, Libya, North Korea, Somalia, Syria and Yemen are barred from entering, along with some groups from Venezuela.
The administration said the restrictions would be in effect until those countries proved to the United States that they had adequate screening. But the appeals court said that the ban was, in effect, an indefinite one, and that Congress did not give the president the authority to stop immigration from any country indefinitely.
“The proclamation’s duration can be considered definite only to the extent one presumes that the restrictions will, indeed, incentivize countries to improve their practices,” the ruling said. “There is little evidence to support such an assumption.”
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