A second United States appeals court on Monday ruled against President Donald Trump’s temporary travel ban on people entering the United States from six Muslim-majority countries, largely upholding a lower court’s decision.

The 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals in San Francisco reviewed a March ruling by a Hawaii-based federal judge that blocked parts of Trump’s order.

The ruling came after a separate court, the Richmond, Virginia-based 4th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals, on May 25 upheld a Maryland judge’s ruling blocking parts of the order.

The Trump administration on June 1 asked the U.S. Supreme Court to block the Hawaii and Richmond rulings and revive the ban.

Hawaii Federal Judge Derrick Watson blocked a March 6 executive order barring travellers from Libya, Iran, Somalia, Sudan, Syria and Yemen for 90 days while the government put in place stricter visa screening.

Watson also blocked a directive that suspended the entry of refugee applicants for 120 days, as well as other instructions for the government to study tougher vetting procedures.

The 9th Circuit on Monday upheld the block on Trump’s travel ban and a cap on refugees. However, the appeals court vacated part of the injunction in order to allow the government to conduct internal reviews on vetting. </s> WASHINGTON (AP) – The Justice Department is asking a federal appeals court to set aside a judge’s order that temporarily blocked the Trump administration’s travel ban.

The federal government’s request for an emergency stay was filed Saturday night with the 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals.

The filing asks the court to lift an order from a day earlier from a judge in Washington state.

The ruling from U.S. District Judge James Robart temporarily halted a Trump administration executive order that suspended America’s refugee program and halted immigration to the U.S. from seven Muslim-majority countries.

The administration on Saturday moved to suspend enforcement of the travel ban as the Justice Department readied its legal challenge.

President Donald Trump has lashed out at Robart on Twitter, calling him a “so-called judge.”

Never miss another Facebook post from WISH-TV </s> SAN FRANCISCO (AP) – A federal appeals court in San Francisco has refused to reinstate President Donald Trump’s ban on travelers from seven predominantly Muslim nations.

The 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals on Thursday wouldn’t block a lower-court ruling that suspended the ban and allowed previously barred travelers to enter the U.S. An appeal to the U.S. Supreme Court is possible.

U.S. District Judge James Robart in Seattle issued a temporary restraining order halting the ban last week after Washington state and Minnesota sued. The Justice Department appealed to the 9th Circuit.

Government lawyers argued that the ban was a “lawful exercise” of the president’s authority and that the seven countries have raised terrorism concerns.

The states said Trump’s executive order unconstitutionally blocked entry based on religion. </s> A U.S. Appeals Court on Monday upheld a lower court ruling that blocks President Donald Trump’s executive order banning travellers from six Muslim-majority countries.

 The US Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals in Seattle was the second appeals court to uphold an earlier court’s move to put the executive order on hold while challenges against its constitutionality move forward.

 The Trump administration had appealed to the court over the earlier ruling by a federal judge in Hawaii.

 The court had halted implementation of the entire executive order, which also sought to block issuances of new refugee admissions from around the world for 120 days.

 A separate decision on the order in the Fourth Circuit has already been appealed to the U.S. Supreme Court. </s> May 25 (Reuters) - The U.S. 4th Circuit Court of Appeals in Virginia on Thursday refused to reinstate President Donald Trump's temporary travel ban for six Muslim-majority nations, in another legal blow to the White House.

A majority of judges on the appeals court, in a 10-3 decision, said they were "unconvinced" the travel order had more to do with national security concerns than a "Muslim ban."

The court also found the challengers were likely to suffer "irreparable harm" if the ban were implemented and that it might violate the U.S. Constitution.

The appeals court maintained the injunction against the travel ban in full.

The appeals court was reviewing a March ruling by a Maryland-based federal judge that blocked part of Trump's March 6 executive order barring travelers from Libya, Iran, Somalia, Sudan, Syria and Yemen for 90 days while the government put in place stricter visa screening.

A similar ruling against Trump's policy from a Hawaii-based federal judge is still in place and the 9th Circuit U.S. Court of Appeals court is reviewing that decision. (Reporting by Mica Rosenberg, Dan Levine and Andrew Chung; Additional reporting by Lawrence Hurley; Editing by Chris Reese and Tom Brown) </s> (CN) – The Ninth Circuit on Monday became the second federal appeals court to uphold a stay of President Donald Trump’s revised travel ban, even as he presses the Supreme Court to reinstate it.

Monday’s decision follows a May 25 ruling by the Fourth Circuit that concluded Trump intended to discriminate against Muslims from the six countries he targeted in his executive order.

The administration on June 1 asked the U.S. Supreme Court to let the ban take effect while the justices decide whether to review the Fourth Circuit ruling.

The three-judge Ninth Circuit panel ruled that Trump exceeded the scope of his authority in issuing the revised travel ban and largely upheld a ruling in Hawaii federal court that prevented the implementation of a ban on all travelers from six Muslim-majority countries.

“Immigration, even for the President, is not a one-person show,” the 86-page opinion states. “The President must make a sufficient finding that the entry of these classes of people would be ‘detrimental to the interests of the United States.’”

The ruling marks the second defeat for the Trump administration in the Ninth Circuit, with both decisions focusing on the presence of unconstitutional religious discrimination against Muslims embedded in each executive order. The first one was issued a week after Trump assumed office and a second, revised travel ban came in early March.

In the first case, the state of Washington sued the Trump administration, saying the ban was a thinly veiled attempt at harming Muslims. U.S. District Court Judge James Robart granted Washington a temporary restraining order, preventing implementation of the ban. The Ninth Circuit refused in February to reinstate the first travel ban.

Rather than appealing, the Trump administration revised the travel ban in a new executive order issued March 6.

This time around, Hawaii sued and U.S. District Court Judge Derrick Watson granted a temporary restraining order for similar reasons.

After Watson’s ruling, U.S. Attorney General Jeff Sessions criticized it by saying he was “amazed that a judge sitting on an island in the Pacific can issue an order that stops the President of the United States from what appears to be clearly his statutory and constitutional power.”

Monday’s Ninth Circuit ruling will most likely be appealed to the Supreme Court, which is already weighing whether to take up the Fourth Circuit appeal. </s> WASHINGTON, DC – The Justice Department on Saturday moved to appeal a decision that temporarily halted enforcement of President Donald Trump’s travel ban.

The appeal concerns a late Friday decision by a US district court that halted the enforcement of Trump’s executive order. Trump’s policy banned travel to the US from seven Muslim-majority countries for 90 days, suspended all refugee entry to the US for 120 days and indefinitely suspended entry for Syrian refugees.

A notice of appeal was sent Saturday night to the US district court, where Judge James Robart, a George W. Bush appointee, presides in Seattle.

The Justice Department is expected to file its brief laying out its legal argument later Saturday night to the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals, which will hear the appeal.

Hours after Robart’s ruling, the Department of Homeland Security announced it had suspended all actions to implement the immigration order and would resume standard inspections of travelers as it did prior to the signing of the travel ban. But it urged the Justice Department to challenge the ruling “at the earliest possible time.”

The three judges who will likely hear the appeal — assuming no one has to step aside over any conflicts — are: Judge William Canby, who was appointed by President Jimmy Carter; Richard Clifton, who was appointed by Bush; and Michelle Friedland, a President Barack Obama appointee.

Robart, ruling in a lawsuit brought by the attorneys general of Washington state and Minnesota who sought to stop the order, said the states “have met their burden of demonstrating that they face immediate and irreparable injury as a result of the signing and implementation of the executive order. ”

He said the order adversely affects residents in areas of education, employment, education and freedom to travel. </s> President Donald Trump said his new immigration executive order will be tailored to the federal court decision that paused his travel ban.

Trump said the tailoring is currently being worked out by his lawyers and will be rolled out next week.

“The new order is going to be very much tailored to what I consider to be a very bad decision,” said Trump during a news conference, referring to a decision by the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals that blocked his travel ban earlier this month.

Meanwhile, the Justice Department filed a brief Thursday telling the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals that it does not need a larger panel of judges to rehear its failed emergency challenge to a lower court’s temporary suspension of Trump’s executive order on immigration because a new order is on the way.

The Justice Department wrote at length about the “seriously flawed” Ninth Circuit ruling from last week, but neverthless said: “(r)ather than continuing this litigation, the President intends in the near future to rescind the order and replace it with a new, substantially revised executive order to eliminate what the panel erroneously thought were constitutional concerns.”

“In so doing, the President will clear the way for immediately protecting the country rather than pursuing further, potentially time-consuming litigation,” it added.

Questions have swirled over what the Trump administration would do this week after a three-judge panel on the Ninth Circuit refused to lift a federal judge’s temporary restraining order on Trump’s executive order barring foreign nationals from Iran, Sudan, Libya, Somalia, Syria, Iraq and Yemen from entering the country for 90 days, all refugees for 120 days and all refugees from Syria indefinitely.

Last Friday, an unidentified judge on the Ninth Circuit requested that the full court vote on whether to rehear the decision reached by the three-judge panel. Such requests are not uncommon, but the call for a vote came at time when the Justice Department’s position on pursuing the appeal was uncertain.

The states that brought the lawsuit — Washington and Minnesota — said in their court filing on Thursday that there is no basis for rehearing the case.

And while the nation waits on a new or modified executive order on immigration from the Trump administration, at least one federal court is barreling ahead on litigation over the original one.

US District Court Judge James Robart in Seattle — the judge who originally halted the key provisions of the travel ban — denied a request from the Trump administration earlier this week to postpone any further proceedings in his court, which means the parties will now proceed to the discovery phase of the case. </s> The Department of Justice has filed an appeal against a federal judge in Washington state’s ruling that temporarily halted President Donald Trump’s executive order on immigration.

The ruling, handed down Friday by Judge James Robart, came as a result of a lawsuit brought by the states of Washington and Minnesota to halt the order, which temporarily barred travelers and refugees from seven Muslim countries from entering the U.S.

According to the Associated Press, the request for an emergency stay, which would reinstate the order, was filed Saturday night in the 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals. This move was largely expected after White House press secretary Sean Spicer issued a statement Friday night calling the ruling an “outrageous order” and saying the administration would file an appeal “at the earliest possible time.”

Trump also blasted the decision on Twitter Saturday morning, saying it spelled “big trouble” and challenging the authority of “this so-called judge.”

Trump also referenced a ruling by a Boston judge earlier Friday that would have allowed an injunction against the ban to expire Sunday, allowing authorities to reinstitute the travel restrictions. Robart’s decision overrode this ruling and was granted on a nationwide basis, per ABC News.

“Why aren't the lawyers looking at and using the Federal Court decision in Boston, which is at conflict with ridiculous lift ban decision?” Trump wrote on Twitter.

However, the appeal is also likely to create confusion as the Department of Homeland Security and the State Department began giving airlines clearance to accept U.S. visa-holders from the affected countries onto flights on Saturday morning. According to the Associated Press, this has led to a crush of people attempting to enter the country while the order is no longer in effect.

The 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals is headquartered in San Francisco, but also has facilities in Seattle.

This is a developing story and will be updated with more details. </s> A three-judge Appeals Court panel issued a unanimous ruling Thursday afternoon rejecting the Trump administration’s claim of “unreviewable” presidential power and sustaining a judicial order that bars enforcement of Trump’s temporary ban on travel from seven Muslim-majority countries, as well as his temporary ban on the entry of refugees from any country.

The 3-0 ruling was signed by judges William Canby, appointed by Jimmy Carter in 1980; Richard Clifton, appointed by George W. Bush in 2001; and Michelle Friedland, appointed by Barack Obama in 2013. They denied a Trump administration request for an immediate stay of the temporary restraining order issued February 3 by Federal District Judge James Robart in Seattle, Washington.

The panel declared: “[T]he Government has not shown a likelihood of success on the merits of its appeal, nor has it shown that failure to enter a stay would cause irreparable injury, and we therefore deny its emergency motion for a stay.”

The 29-page decision subjects the Trump administration’s legal position and factual claims to withering criticism. The judges declare that the government presented no evidence that halting the travel ban would endanger national security or American lives. By contrast, the ruling held that the states of Washington and Minnesota, which brought suit against the ban, demonstrated widespread and irreparable damage on their citizens and institutions if the travel ban were reinstated.

The appeals court decision by no means ends the conflict over the travel ban. From a legal standpoint, it was not a final determination on the merits of the case, but merely continued the suspension of the travel ban while the lawsuit is more fully adjudicated.

President Trump responded to the ruling within minutes, tweeting, “SEE YOU IN COURT, THE SECURITY OF OUR NATION IS AT STAKE!” The Department of Justice, under newly sworn-in Attorney General Jeff Sessions, an adamant opponent of immigrants, whether documented or undocumented, said in a statement that it was “reviewing the decision and considering its options.”

One possible step would be a Trump administration appeal of Thursday’s decision to the US Supreme Court. However, the court has lacked a ninth justice for a year, since the death of Justice Antonin Scalia, and has had frequent 4-4 splits during that time. An evenly divided court would leave the denial of a stay by the Ninth Circuit intact.

Some right-wing legal commentators urged Trump to withdraw the executive order, which suffers from numerous technical defects pointed out in the court decision, and reissue it after consultation with congressional leaders and the newly installed members of the Trump cabinet, including Sessions. This step could delay Supreme Court review until after the confirmation of Trump’s nominee to fill the high court vacancy, Neil Gorsuch, in the expectation that he would provide a fifth and deciding vote for the government.

A third possibility, for which Trump seemed to lay the basis in a series of increasingly vituperative statements during the week, would be to directly defy the court ruling, escalating the conflict within the US political system to the level of a constitutional crisis. Certainly, Trump’s declaration that “If something happens blame him [Judge Robart] and the court system,” should be taken as a warning. The White House is prepared to use any terrorist attack that occurs as a pretext to breach constitutional norms and establish an authoritarian regime backed by the military and police.

The US ruling elite is deeply divided over what course of action to take. Speaking for those sections of the military-intelligence apparatus hostile to Trump, former Director of National Intelligence James Clapper appeared on CNN only hours before the court ruling, declaring that he knew of no terrorist threat that could justify the travel ban, and warning that the ban had damaged relationships with US allies in the Middle East and would serve as a recruiting tool for Muslim extremist groups.

Even Trump’s own nominee to the Supreme Court, Gorsuch, voiced opposition to Trump’s tweets lambasting the “so-called judge” and suggesting the appeals court hearing Tuesday was “disgraceful.” Gorsuch is himself an appeals court judge, on the Tenth Circuit, and he told a Democratic senator that such attacks on judges were “disheartening” and “demoralizing.”

The intensity of the political conflict, within three weeks of Trump’s inauguration, is reflected in the language of the Appeals Court decision, which systematically eviscerated the arguments made by the Trump administration in legal briefs and in the course of an hour-long oral argument Tuesday.

The three-judge panel found that the district court had the authority to rule on the Executive Order, rejecting the government’s claim that the president has “unreviewable authority to suspend the admission of any class of aliens.” The government was not merely claiming that the political branches should be shown deference by the judiciary on national security issues, they wrote: “Instead, the Government has taken the position that the President’s decisions about immigration policy, particularly when motivated by national security concerns, are unreviewable, even if those actions potentially contravene constitutional rights and protections.”

They added, in language that underscores the implications of Trump’s actions and his administration’s legal argument: “There is no precedent to support this claimed unreviewability, which runs contrary to the fundamental structure of our constitutional democracy.”

The ruling cited a series of Supreme Court decisions striking down actions taken by the federal government and justified in the name of “national security.” These include the 2008 Boumediene decision, in which the court found, over the objections of the Bush administration, that prisoners held in Guantanamo Bay had the right to seek a writ of habeas corpus and gain judicial review of their continued detention . The panel noted that at this stage in the legal proceeding, the burden was on the federal government to show that it was likely to succeed on the merits of its case and that it would suffer irreparable injury if the travel ban continued to be blocked. The government failed on both grounds, the three judges decided.

The ruling laid the most stress on the argument by the states of Washington and Minnesota that the travel ban was a gross violation of the constitutional requirement of due process, which applies not only to American citizens, but also to legal permanent residents, and to those without legal papers who are on American soil.

Even refugees seeking entry into the United States have rights under “procedures provided by federal statute,” which could not be overridden by the president. The panel rejected the claim of the Trump administration “that most or all of the individuals affected by the Executive Order have no rights under the Due Process Clause.”

The judges treated with some contempt the efforts by the Trump administration to rectify the obviously unconstitutional denial of rights to legal permanent residents. The inclusion of these green-card holders under the executive order was demanded by Trump’s fascistic chief adviser, Stephen K. Bannon, who overrode objections from Department of Homeland Security officials. After a series of unfavorable court rulings, the White House sought to “reinterpret” the order on the fly, with a statement by Chief of Staff Reince Priebus and further directives to the DHS. Finally, White House counsel Donald F. McGahn issued “Authoritative Guidance” that the order did not apply to green-card holders.

The judges wrote: “At this point, however, we cannot rely upon the Government’s contention that the Executive Order no longer applies to lawful permanent residents. The Government has offered no authority establishing that the White House counsel is empowered to issue an amended order superseding the Executive Order signed by the President and now challenged by the States, and that proposition seems unlikely.

“Nor has the Government established that the White House counsel’s interpretation of the Executive Order is binding on all executive branch officials responsible for enforcing the Executive Order. The White House counsel is not the President, and he is not known to be in the chain of command for any of the Executive Departments. Moreover, in light of the Government’s shifting interpretations of the Executive Order, we cannot say that the current interpretation by White House counsel, even if authoritative and binding, will persist past the immediate stage of these proceedings.”

The court ruling says that claims that the Trump executive order violates the establishment clause of the First Amendment because it was aimed at Muslims should be taken seriously, and it flatly rejects the White House claim that Trump’s intentions can only be inferred from the text of the order—which makes no mention of Muslims—and not from his public statements.

The judges write: “It is well established that evidence of purpose beyond the face of the challenged law may be considered in evaluating Establishment and Equal Protection Clause claims… The States’ claims raise serious allegations and present significant constitutional questions.” But they decline to pronounce further on the issue, pending actual discussion of this issue in further proceedings.
Trump's travel ban remains suspended as the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit denies the Justice Department's request to stay the ruling which blocks major portions of the executive order.