Second U.S. district court denies Trump travel ban

Judge Theodore Chuang

ANOTHER ASIAN/AMERICAN judge has blocked parts of DonaldTrump's most recent attempt to impose broad limits on who can enter the U.S., granting a motion for a preliminary injunction that was filed by plaintiffs led by the International Refugee Assistance Project.

In Maryland, federal District Judge Theodore Chuang is the second Asian/American judge to render a decision thwarting the launch of Trump's latest attempt to restrict travel from six predominantly Muslim countries. Trump's latest version of the travel ban was supposed to take effect today (Oct. 18).

The plaintiffs "have established that they are likely to succeed on the merits," Chuang wrote in the Tuesday order in dealing another setback to the Trump administration's attempt to ban travel to the U.S. by citizens of certain countries.

Chuang said the plaintiffs "are likely to suffer irreparable harm in the absence of injunctive relief, and that the balance of the equities and the public interest favor an injunction."

RELATED: Hawaii court stymies Trump's newest travel ban

The judge's order was filed one day before Trump's ban was set to take effect. It follows a similar order Tuesday from Federal Judge Derrick Watson of Hawaii in a related case.

“The third defeat of Trump’s unconstitutional Muslim ban is a crucial victory for millions across the country," said Rep. Pramila Jayapal, D-Wash., "I’m glad to see Judges Watson and Chuang block this state-sanctioned hate, but our fight for justice continues. These Muslim bans underline Trump’s hardheaded crusade for xenophobic policies that demonize, otherize and vilify millions of people.

In his 91-page order, the Taiwanese/American judge cited the president's tweets and statements as evidence the third version of the policy carried the same intent as the Muslim ban Trump backed on the campaign trail.

"To the extent that the Government might have provided additional evidence to establish that national security is now the primary purpose for the travel ban, it has not done so," the judge wrote. "Of course, even if such evidence was forthcoming, its value in obviating the taint of the earlier Executive Orders would be limited."

The court also ruled that the inclusion of North Korea and Venenzuela was "window dressing" in an attempt to disguise the real intent of the ban. The court further explained that a person with “common sense” would see this ban as “the latest incarnation of the ‘Muslim ban’ originally promised by President Trump as a candidate for the presidency.”

Recent positive statements by Trump about Islam did not repudiate Trump's prior statements about imposting a Muslim ban. Any doubt about the president’s continuing message of intolerance and condemnation was dispelled in August, when he invoked a false historical anecdote to endorse an urban legend that never occurred during the Philippine-American War when U.S. troops in the Philippines used   “shooting Muslims with bullets dipped in pig’s blood” to dissuade the rebel resistance.

The Maryland court held that the new ban, like the earlier versions, violates the Establishment Clause of the Constitution. That clause requires the government to remain neutral among religions and prohibits official condemnation of people because of their religion. The court explained that the new ban is “the inextricable re-animation of the twice-enjoined Muslim ban.” In fact, it is even worse: The prior versions were temporary, but this one is open-ended and could eventually be permanent.

Finally, as the Maryland and Hawaii courts explained, the proposed travel restrictions adopt nationality-based discrimination for people seeking green cards, even though Congress has specifically banned that discrimination.

UPDATED: Oct. 18, 11 p.m.

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Court stymies launch of Trump's newest travel ban

Federal Judge Derrick Watson (left) and Hawaii's Attorney General Doug Chin.

HAWAII IS WOKE! Late Tuesday (Oct. 17), mere hours before it was set to take effect, a federal judge in Hawaii blocked most of President Donald Trump's latest travel ban Tuesday.

The temporary restraining order by U.S. District Judge Derrick Watson will most certainly place the Hawaiian judge and Hawaii's Attorney General Doug Chin in Donald Trump's Twitter crosshairs.

"This is the third time Hawaii has gone to court to stop President Trump from issuing a travel ban that discriminates against people based on their nation of origin or religion," Hawaii Attorney General Doug Chin said in a statement. "Today is another victory for the rule of law."

In his 40-page decision, the Hawaii-born Watson wrote that the newest attempt to impose travel restrictions "suffers from precisely the same maladies as its predecessor."

The third Trump-inspired travel ban announced in September and set to go into effect early Wednesday, would have restricted travelers from Chad, Iran, Libya, North Korea, Somalia, Syria and Yemen, along with some Venezuelan government officials and their families.

“The American Muslim community is heartened by the district court’s decision to block the Trump Administration's racist and xenophobic agenda," said Zahra Biloo of the Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR). "It is our hope that Muslim Ban 3.0 will be the last iteration of an unconstitutional policy that hurts communities across our country. We will continue to fight until this ban, and all anti-Muslim and anti-immigrant policies are repealed.”

The latest version of the travel ban "plainly discriminates based on nationality in the manner that the 9th Circuit has found antithetical to ... the founding principles of this nation," Watson ruled. His decision would not affect any restrictions for Venezuela and North Korea.

"It exceeds the limits on the President's exclusion authority that have been recognized for nearly a century, by supplanting Congress's immigration policies with the President's own unilateral and indefinite ban," the challengers in Hawaii wrote of the new ban. "And it continues to effectuate the President's unrepudiated promise to exclude Muslims from the United States."

Watson wrote that the order did "not reveal why existing law is insufficient to address the President's described concerns" and that it was internally flawed - for example, by exempting Iraq from the banned list even though Iraq failed the U.S. government's security assessment.

Watson’s order is a temporary stop on the ban, while a lawsuit over the ins and outs of the legality of the ban will argued in coming months.

The ban is also being weighed in other courts.

In Maryland, the American Civil Liberties Union and other groups are seeking to block the visa and entry restrictions. 

Washington state, Massachusetts, California, Oregon, New York and Maryland are challenging the order in front of the same federal judge in Seattle who struck down Trump’s initial ban in January.

That ban — aimed mostly at Muslim-majority countries — led to chaos, confusion and demonstrations at airports throughout the country and triggered several lawsuits, including one from Hawaii.

That led to the Trump administration revising the ban, which Hawaii challenged, and Watson agreed it discriminated on the basis of nationality and religion. A subsequent U.S. Supreme Court ruling allowed the administration to partially reinstate restrictions against Iran, Libya, Somalia, Sudan, Syria and Yemen and against all refugees.

Hawaii then successfully challenged the government’s definition of which relatives of people already living in the U.S. would be allowed into the country, and Watson ordered the list expanded.

"We hope that both the courts and Americans in general remember other moments in recent history where the government has systematically discriminated against specific groups of people, such as the internment of Japanese Americans and the Chinese Exclusion Act," said Aarti Kohli,of Asian Americans Advancing Justice.________________________________________________________________________________________