WASHINGTON – A federal appeals court judge says President Donald Trump has the authority to block foreign travelers and courts must defer to the president’s judgment in decisions about who should be allowed in the United States.
Judge Jay Bybee of the 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals said in court documents filed Wednesday that his appeals court colleagues were wrong when they refused to immediately reinstate Trump’s original travel ban.
The Trump administration later revised the ban. A federal judge in Hawaii blocked that version on Wednesday. Bybee is a nominee of President George W. Bush.
Bybee says judges cannot investigate the president’s motive for the ban as along as he provides a bona fide and legitimate reason for it. Bybee says the president had done that.
Trump blasted the court for halting what he’s calling a “watered-down version” of his travel ban.
Trump told supporters Wednesday at a campaign-style rally in Nashville, Tennessee, that he learned that a district judge in Hawaii had halted his order, which temporarily suspends the U.S. refugee program and bars the entry of people from certain Muslim-majority countries.
Trump says the ruling is “unprecedented judicial overreach” and “makes us look weak.”
He says he’s going to fight the decision and take it all the way to the Supreme Court, if necessary. And he says, “We’re going to win.”
The federal judge in Hawaii who put Trump’s revised travel ban on hold cited “questionable evidence supporting the government’s national security motivation.”
U.S. District Judge Derrick Watson also said Hawaii would suffer financially if the executive order goes into effect and blocks the flow of students and tourists to the state.
Watson issued his 43-page ruling less than two hours after hearing arguments on Hawaii’s request to block the ban that was to have gone into effect Thursday.
The judge says Hawaii is likely to succeed on a claim that the ban violates the First Amendment right protecting people against religious discrimination.
Watson was nominated to the federal bench by President Barack Obama. He is currently the only Native Hawaiian judge serving on the federal bench and the fourth in U.S. history. He received his law degree from Harvard Law School in 1991.
A federal judge in Seattle said after a hearing that he will issue a written order about whether to block Trump’s revised travel ban but didn’t say when he would make his decision.
Judge James Robart told lawyers for an immigrant rights group and for the Justice Department that he’s most interested in whether the ban violates federal immigration law, and whether affected immigrants would be irreparably harmed should the ban go into effect.
The judge spent much of the Wednesday hearing grilling the lawyers about two seemingly conflicting federal laws on immigration – one which gives the president the authority to keep any class of aliens out of the country, and another that forbids the government from discriminating on the basis of nationality when it comes to issuing immigrant visas.
