Hawaii Judge Strikes Down Third Trump Travel Ban

By streiff | 3:51 PM on October 17, 2017

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*Detail from "The Bench" by William Hogarth (1758) judge, judges, court, courts*

A federal judge on Tuesday largely blocked the Trump administration from implementing the latest version of the president’s controversial travel ban, setting up yet another legal showdown on the extent of the executive branch’s powers when it comes to setting immigration policy.

The decision from Judge Derrick K. Watson in Hawaii is sure to be appealed, but for now, it means that the administration cannot restrict the entry of travelers from six of the eight countries that officials said were either unable or unwilling to provide information that the United States wanted to vet their citizens.

The latest ban was set to fully go into effect in the early morning hours of Wednesday, barring various types of travelers from Syria, Libya, Iran, Yemen, Chad, Somalia, North Korea and Venezuela. Watson’s order stops it, at least temporarily, with respect to all the countries except North Korea and Venezuela.

In a 40-page decision granting the state of Hawaii’s request for a temporary restraining order, Watson wrote that the latest ban “suffers from precisely the same maladies as its predecessor: it lacks sufficient findings that the entry of more than 150 million nationals from six specified countries would be ‘detrimental to the interests of the United States.’”

He also wrote that the executive order “plainly discriminates based on nationality” in a way that was opposed to federal law and “the founding principles of this Nation.”

This essentially resets the board to where it was before the Supreme Court declared the case against the last travel ban (I’m using “travel ban” as shorthand as actually it banned travel from one state sponsor of terrorism and six failed states) moot and dismissed the injunctions that had been granted.

His decision also flies squarely in the face of the last Supreme Court decision which overturned most of the objections this judge relitigates today.

More likely than not, this will end up back at the Supreme Court where the odds are overwhelming that it will be overturned.