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Monday, March 18, 2024 | Back issues
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Version 3 of Trump Travel Ban Faces Supreme Court Review

The Supreme Court agreed Friday to review President Trump’s travel ban — a version found by the Ninth Circuit to include the same biases that sank two prior iterations.

WASHINGTON (CN) - The Supreme Court agreed Friday to review President Trump’s travel ban — a version found by the Ninth Circuit to include the same biases that sank two prior iterations.

Per its custom, the justices took up the case from Hawaii without comment. Hawaii and the International Refugee Assistance Project had initiated two of the successful challenges to Trump’s first travel ban, which imposed a 90-day bar on nationals from six Muslim-majority countries from entering the United States, as well as excluding all refugees for 120 days.

Though the Supreme Court had agreed to hear Trump’s appeals in these cases last year, the expiration of Trump’s order led the justices to dismiss the issue as moot.

Trump is now on Version 3 of the travel ban, which imposes restrictions on travelers from Chad, Iran, Libya, Somalia, Syria and Yemen, as well as two countries that are not Muslim majority: Venezuela and North Korea.

Both Iraq and Sudan have been removed since the initial version.

In its ruling against the latest version last month, the Ninth Circuit found that Trump had exceeded his executive authority and violated the Immigration and Nationality Act’s prohibition on nationality-based discrimination in the issuance of immigrant visas.

In a nod to the Supreme Court’s reinstatement of some aspects of the earlier ban, the Ninth Circuit limited its December injunction to “foreign travelers who have a bona fide relationship with a person or entity in the United States.”

Restrictions on Venezuelan officials or immigrants from North Korea have not been affected by the ongoing litigation.

In other Supreme Court news, Trump submitted a petition Friday for the justices to review his administration’s termination of Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals.

The federal program offered certain legal rights to 800,000 qualifying immigrants so that they could work or go to school in the United States without fear of deportation.

After the White House announced in September that it would shutter DACA, U.S. District Judge William Alsup barred this result with a Jan. 9 injunction.

The Trump administration’s petition for certiorari in this case Friday is unusual because it bypasses the step of seeking Ninth Circuit review.

Justice Department officials have said Alsup's decision could keep DACA in place for more than a year without Supreme Court review.

As this battle is underway in the courts, DACA has been a sticking point in negotiations Friday on Capitol Hill to avert a shutdown of the federal government.

While attorneys for the president were petitioning the Supreme Court on DACA this morning, Trump put off his weekend travel to Florida to meet with Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer on the looming shutdown. The Senate has until midnight to rule on a temporary appropriations bill proposed by Republicans to keep the government open.

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Categories / Appeals, Civil Rights, Government, International, Politics

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