December 29, 2017
A US appeals court Friday said President Trump’s hotly contested visa ban targeting people from six Muslim-majority countries should not be applied to people with strong US ties, repeating what the US Supreme Court said last spring but dropped in the fall.
However, the 9th US Circuit Court of Appeals, which covers several West Coast states, said its ruling would be put on hold pending a decision on the latest version of the travel ban by the Supreme Court. In other words, the appeals court’s decision will have no impact whatsoever. The country must continue to await Supreme Court action, which is anticipated in the New Year.
Since taking office last January, Trump has been struggling to enact visa restrictions that pass court muster.
A three-judge panel from the 9th Circuit Friday narrowed a previous injunction from a lower federal court to those people “with a credible bona fide relationship with the United States.”
It also said that while the US president has broad powers to regulate the entry of immigrants into the United States, those powers are not without limits.
“We conclude that the President’s issuance of the Proclamation once again exceeds the scope of his delegated authority,” the three-judge panel said.
The ban targets people from Chad, Iran, Libya, Somalia, Syria and Yemen seeking to enter the United States. Trump says the visa ban is needed to protect the United States from terrorists.
The state of Hawaii challenged it in court, and a federal judge in Honolulu said it exceeded Trump’s powers under immigration law. Trump appealed to the 9th Circuit.
Trump’s ban also covers people from North Korea and certain government officials from Venezuela, but the lower courts had already allowed those provisions to go into effect.
The ban has some exceptions. Certain people from each targeted country can still apply for a visa for tourism, business or education purposes, and applicants can ask for individual waivers.
With regard to Iran, the visa ban does not apply to students accepted by American universities, although it is males in the student age group that most concerns US officials hunting for potential terrorists. But the Trump ban does bar visas for Iranian grandmothers from seeking to visit their grandkids, although terrorist-hunters don’t worry about grannies.