A week after signing, legal challenges continue to rage against President Trump’s executive order banning refugees and banning all travel from seven Muslim-majority countries, with multiple federal judges coming in tonight with new rulings challenging the order, and the Customs and Border Patrol (CBP) confirming they will begin reinstating visas on the basis of those rulings. The State Department later confirmed they will allow via holders into the US.
Judge James Robart, in Seattle, signed a temporary restraining order blocking all enforcement of the order, nationwide. His full written ruling has not been released yet, however, and the Justice Department is withholding comments on whether they’ll comply until they see the ruling.
Within the administration, flat out ignoring court orders has been treated as very much an option. Last week, the CBP was spurning a court order requiring detained travelers be given access to lawyers at the DC Airport, with police at the airport shooing Congressmen away who tried to get access to the detainees. At the time, the Justice Department insisted they wouldn’t even attempt to defend the order in court, though Trump has since fired that acting attorney general in favor of another.
Legal challenges to the existing detention of travelers has been difficult because there isn’t public information on who is even being held. This sparked an order from a Virginia judge that the White House provide a complete list of everyone denied entry since the ban went into effect.
Meanwhile, Judge Victoria Roberts, in Detroit, also ruled against the executive order, insisting it could not be applied to travelers who had lawful permanent residence in the United States at the time of Trump’s ban.
The executive has considerable authority to regulate the entry of individual foreigners. It can and has overruled waiting times or other restrictions as in the case of Wernher von Braun for example who was actually secretly and possibly illegally smuggled into the country by the Truman administration. The executive has the legal authority to void an immigration visum of a single foreigner if the applicant is shown to have lied. Example: Germans admitted after WW2 who had withheld the fact that they had been members of the SS.
The executive cannot void legal contracts of the US with a group of unrelated immigrants which have not violated any of the conditions for obtaining (and paying for) their immigration visa. These contracts were signed by ambassadors or other US representatives on behalf of our entire nation and not of the single occupant of the Oval Office..
The contract called immigration visum also promises the holder that he or she can become a US citizen after five years of uninterrupted US residence (absence for travel does not count).
If there are causes for our immigration laws to be changed as they have been in the past that is the task of the legislative and not of a single impersonator of Moses sitting at a desk in the Oval Office to pronounce the new Ten Commandments for immigration. I do not find that power in Article 2 of our Constitution. Perhaps the Supreme Court has ruled that the President can do this but several judges who know infinitely more about the constitution than I do have ruled no, he does not have that authority.
I hope that these cases will go all the way to the US Supreme Court.
This saga continues. The Trump administration has asked an appeals court to restore the original ban-order. The appeals court has denied the request and has asked both sides for more information.
The request of the Trump administration to the appeals court contains an argument which anti-war readers can immediately recognize as spurious if not nonsensical. The argument is that the judge’s original order “tramples on Trump’s powers as Commander in Chief”. What? He is not Commander in Chief. He is Commander in Chief of the US Armed Forces. He is not Commander in Chief of any civilian involved in the ban-order. His authority of CiC of the Armed Forces has not been diminished.