By Chloe Marina Manchester
On Monday, March 6, President Donald Trump issued a new executive order updating previous ban on immigration and travel from six majority Muslim countries. On Thursday, March 9, Washington state Attorney General Bob Ferguson said that Washington state would again take Trump to court to extend the restraining order issued in response to the original ban to this new ban in an effort to block the enforcement of the order.
The new travel ban is largely the same as the original executive order, with many calling it the “Muslim ban 2.0.” One difference is that it did not immediately go into effect, so people in the air or just arriving at airports should not be affected, something the original order was widely criticized for. The new ban is set to go into effect March 16, ten days after Trump’s announcement of the new ban, and be in effect for 90 days.
The previous ban was put into effect immediately after it was signed, leaving many people stranded or detained in airports.
The United States Refugee program will be suspended for 120 days after the ban comes into effect. The new order, as did the old one, will indefinitely suspend Syrian refugees from entrance into the United States. The order also stipulates that the President may add or remove any country from the list included in the ban, Iran, Libya, Somalia, Sudan, Syria, and Yemen.
The new ban is narrower in scope, with immigrants, refugees, and travelers from Iraq now allowed into the country due to the new executive order acknowledging that Iraq works closely with the U.S., although the president retains the ability to add Iraq back to the list of the banned countries. Iraq could get re-added if the government does not comply with the Trumps administration’s request for increased intelligence sharing. The new ban also clarified that those who are already legally residing in the United States with visas or greencards can still re-enter the U.S.
Ferguson told NPR, prior to his statements Thursday, “Just because it’s a smaller number of individuals who are impacted, that doesn’t mean you can solve a constitutional problem of the magnitude that the revised ban still has.”
The lawsuit from Washington state and Minnesota against the President and the first immigration ban led a Seattle federal court judge to order a national halt on the enforcement of the ban, deeming it unconstitutional. At the news conference held by Ferguson Thursday he said he would request the Seattle judge in the first case to apply the restraining order from the old ban to the new ban. Attorneys General from New York, Massachusetts, and Oregon also declared their intention to join the legal challenge to the ban.
“The bottom line is that the court issued, and we obtained, a temporary restraining order on the original executive order,” Ferguson told NPR’s Robert Siegel. “Yes, the revised one is more narrow — that’s a success. But the core constitutional problems remain the same.”
Washington’s request to maintain the restraining order against the enforcement of the ban is separate from a new lawsuit filed by Hawaii on Wednesday against Trump’s new executive order. Hawaii’s complaint against the ban says the state objects to the new ban because it has a detrimental effect on both the state’s economy and people. The state also argues that the order unfairly discriminates against Muslims, violating the equal protection and due process guarantees of the Constitution. There is a hearing set for March 15 in Honolulu on Hawaii’s request for a national temporary restraining order on the new ban.
