WASHINGTON — A federal appeals court denied the government’s request to allow it to enforce President Trump’s travel and refugee ban executive order while the case challenging the ban makes its way through the courts.
“[T]he Government has failed to establish that it will likely succeed on its due process argument in this appeal,” the US Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit ruled in a unanimous, unsigned opinion.
Additionally, the court held, “The Government has not shown that a stay is necessary to avoid irreparable injury.”
Failing to meet either of those standards, the three-judge panel ruled that US District Judge James Robart’s Feb. 3 order halting enforcement of major parts of the ban would remain in place.
The Justice Department now could seek a stay of Robart’s order, a move that would start with a request made to Justice Anthony Kennedy, who could then refer the matter to the full court.
Robart’s decision had led the federal government to begin allowing travel from the seven affected majority-Muslim countries and allowing the refugee program to continue.
The Justice Department quickly filed a request with Ninth Circuit, asking the trial court’s order to be stayed, or put on hold, while the merits of the case could be hashed out in court. The appeals court heard arguments over the government’s request on Feb. 7. The three judge panel was skeptical of the government’s request, with one judge from the panel also expressing skepticism of the broad scope of Robart’s order.
A
federal appeals court early Sunday rejected a request by the Justice
Department to immediately restore President Trump’s targeted travel ban,
deepening a legal showdown over his authority to tighten the nation’s
borders in the name of protecting Americans from terrorism.
WASHINGTON — A federal judge in Washington issued the furthest reaching order yet against President Trump’s refugee and travel ban executive order, granting a nationwide order halting enforcement of significant parts of the order.
“For the reasons stated on the record, the court grants Plaintiffs’ Emergency Motion for Temporary Restraining Order. A written order will follow,” a notation on the court docket Friday afternoon stated.
“The decision shuts down the executive order immediately,” Washington Attorney General Bob Ferguson said in a news conference outside the courthouse after US District Judge James Robart issued his ruling in the lawsuit, brought by Ferguson on behalf of the state.
“No one is above the law — not even the President,” Ferguson said.
Ferguson had been seeking an order halting enforcement of both the refugee and section addressing travel from seven majority-Muslim nations. A written copy of the judge’s order, however, was not immediately available to determine the precise confines of the judge’s ruling.
In an interview on CNN, Ferguson said Robart ruled the state had standing to bring the lawsuit and said the state was likely to succeed in its constitutional names — although he added that Robart did not specify in court as to which constitutional arguments he believe the state likely would be successful.
MASSACHUSETTS: The ruling came shortly after a federal judge in Massachusetts provided the Trump administration with its first win in the many challenges to the president’s executive order temporarily halting the refugee program and stopping immigration by people from seven Muslim-majority countries.
US District Judge Nathaniel Gorton issued the order declining to renew the temporary restraining order previously issued by another judge in the federal court in Massachusetts who heard the challenge to Trump’s ban this past weekend.
The ruling in the US District Court for the District of Massachusetts was the second order of the day on the issue — one week after President Trump signed the measure.
VIRGINIA: The first order of the day came when, earlier Friday, US District Judge Leonie Brinkema in the US District Court for the Eastern District of Virginia extended an order providing access to lawyers and preventing the deportation of lawful permanent residents from Dulles International Airport.
Additionally, Brinkema ordered the federal government to provide Virginia — who successfully sought to intervene in the case — with a list of all people who have been denied entry or deported since the executive order was signed who had a residence in Virginia and lawful permanent residence status or a valid immigrant, student, or work visa. The list must be turned over by Feb. 9.
In the course of the hearing, the Justice Department also put a number on the number of visas affected by the temporary ban on travel from seven Muslim-majority nations: 100,000. The number would represent approximately 1% of all visas issued by the US in a given year.
The State Department, however, pushed back on that claim, saying the number is only 60,000.
Brinkema, who noted that she handled cases relating to the attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, said in court Friday that she had never seen a public outpouring like the one she has seen in response to the executive order.
“This order touched something in the United States that I have never seen before,” she said.
The president has broad discretion to act on immigration matters, Brinkema noted, but “it’s not unfettered.” Not all of the thought that should have gone into the executive order did, she added.
During the hearing, Brinkema also held that Virginia could intervene in the case, over the objection of the Justice Department. The move means the lawsuit could continue even if the Justice Department resolves the claims brought by the individual plaintiffs who initially brought the case.
Although Virginia had questioned whether the attempt to settle claims with the named plaintiffs was an attempt to keep Virginia from joining the lawsuit, Erez Reuveni, a senior litigation counsel in the Office of Immigration Litigation at the Justice Department, pushed back against that, saying, “We will meet Virginia in court, I have no doubt about that,” and later adding, “We are not trying to run and hide.”
In court on Friday, Reuveni said about 100,000 visas had been revoked in the wake of the president’s issuance of the executive order; an earlier State Department memo said that they had been “provisionally revoked.”
In a statement later Friday, Will Cocks, the spokesperson for the State Department Bureau of Consular Affairs reiterated the “provisional” revocation — and disputed the Justice Department’s number.
“Fewer than 60,000 individuals’ visas were provisionally revoked to comply with the Executive Order. We recognize that those individuals are temporarily inconvenienced while we conduct our review under the Executive Order,” Cocks said in a statement. “To put that number in context, we issued over 11 million immigrant and non-immigrant visas in fiscal year 2015. As always, national security is our top priority when issuing visas.”
A State Department official followed up, noting that the number was based on the number of valid visas issued to applicants on record as being a national of one of the seven countries. The provisional revocation, the official continued, means that the State Department has invalidated a visa for use to travel to the United States and apply for entry, but remains free to restore the visa’s validity later without the person needing to submit a new visa application. The revocation does not, however, have any impact on the legal status of those already in the United States, the official said.
Near the end of the Friday morning hearing, Brinkema said it was a “real problem” when people were vetted by the US government and authorized to come to the United States, only to have that authorization revoked without fact-finding and hard evidence that there was a need to do so.
“It has obviously thrown hundreds of thousands of people into states of discomfort,” she said.
In response to Virginia’s request that federal officials show that they were following Brinkema’s initial order, the judge said that she was troubled by accusations regarding denial of counsel but would hold off for now on taking any action on the request.
In a later order from the court, Brinkema denied the request, formally a motion for an order to show cause.
Over 100,000 visas have been revoked as a result of President Trump’s
ban on travel from seven predominantly Muslim countries, an attorney
for the government revealed in Alexandria federal court Friday.
The
number came out during a hearing in a lawsuit filed by attorneys for
two Yemeni brothers who arrived at Dulles International Airport last
Saturday. They were coerced into giving up their legal resident visas,
they argue, and quickly put on a return flight to Ethiopia….
The government attorney, Erez Reuveni from the Justice Department’s
Office of Immigration Litigation, could not say how many people with
visas were sent back to their home countries from Dulles in response to
the travel ban. However, he did say that all people with green cards who
came through the airport have been let into the United States. …
Hearseeno 