The day before it is supposed to go into effect President Donald Trump’s revised travel ban will be scrutinized in federal courtrooms across the country on Wednesday.
In Maryland, a US judge will hear arguments from the American Civil Liberties Union and others who want to stop the new directive and more than a half-dozen states are trying to derail the executive order affecting travelers from six Muslim-majority nations.
Hawaii’s lawsuit is heading to federal court in Honolulu, while Washington state, which successfully sued to block the original ban, wants its own hearing before a federal judge in Seattle. Five other states have joined Washington’s challenge.
Here’s a look at what’s going on and the hurdles the new ban faces:
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BUSY DAY IN COURT
Hawaii will argue that the new order will harm its Muslim population, tourism and foreign students. Ismail Elshikh, a plaintiff in the lawsuit, said the ban will prevent his Syrian mother-in-law from visiting.
The federal government will argue that the allegations are pure speculation. Justice Department lawyers also say the president is authorized to restrict or suspend entry into the United States.
In Washington state, Attorney General Bob Ferguson is pushing for a hearing before Judge James Robart, who halted the original ban last month. Ferguson wants Robart to apply the ruling to the new ban.
Ferguson says the new order is unconstitutional and harms residents, universities and businesses, especially tech companies such as Washington state-based Microsoft and Amazon who rely on foreign workers. California, Maryland, Massachusetts, New York and Oregon have joined the claim. Federal lawyers say the revised travel ban is “substantially different” from the original directive.
Immigrant advocacy groups and the ACLU are also suing in Maryland. They will ask a judge there early Wednesday to issue an injunction, saying it’s illegal to reduce the number of refugees in the middle of a fiscal year. The lawsuit is broader, but the ACLU expects a ruling on that part of the case even if other aspects of the ban are blocked elsewhere.
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OLD VERSUS NEW BAN
Washington and Hawaii say the order is an effort to carry out the Muslim ban he promised during his campaign and is a violation of the First Amendment, which bars the government from favoring or disfavoring any religion. On that point, they say, the new ban is no different than the old.
They point to statements by Trump’s advisers, including former New York Mayor Rudy Giuliani, who said Trump asked him how to implement a Muslim ban legally, and Stephen Miller, who said the revised order was designed to have “the same basic policy outcome” as the first.
The new version tries to erase the notion that it was designed to target Muslims by detailing more of a national security rationale. It is narrower and eases some concerns about violating the due process rights of travelers.
It applies only to new visas from Somalia, Iran, Syria, Sudan, Libya and Yemen and temporarily shuts down the US refugee program. It does not apply to travelers who already have visas.
The states’ First Amendment claim has not been resolved. The 9th US Circuit Court of Appeals refused to reinstate the original ban but didn’t rule on the discrimination claim.
Some legal scholars have said the order does not apply to all Muslims or even all predominantly Muslim nations — a point 9th Circuit Judge Richard Clifton made during arguments in Washington’s case.
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DOES THE PRESIDENT HAVE THE AUTHORITY?
The administration says the travel ban is about national security. The revised order specifies that people from the listed countries “warrant additional scrutiny in connection with our immigration policies because the conditions in these countries present heightened threats.”
But intelligence analysts at the Department of Homeland Security have questioned that rationale, concluding that citizenship is an “unlikely indicator” of terrorist ties.
In addition, the states and civil liberties groups say US immigration law generally prohibits the government from discriminating based on nationality when issuing immigrant visas. The president cannot rewrite that law by executive order, the states say.
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ARE THE STATES THE RIGHT ONES TO SUE?
Some legal scholars have questioned whether states have standing to bring their cases, citing limits the Supreme Court has placed on when states can sue the federal government.
Michael McConnell, a constitutional law professor at Stanford Law School, has said he is “highly skeptical” that states can sue over this issue.
The 9th Circuit panel found that Washington and Minnesota, which is part of the original lawsuit, did have standing, at least at that early stage. The judges noted that some people would not enroll in universities or join the faculty, causing real harm for the states.
Hawaii focuses on an additional aspect: the loss of tourism, and thus tax dollars, in the heavily travel-dependent state.
“I don’t think standing’s a serious problem,” said Rory Little, a former Supreme Court clerk who teaches at the University of California Hastings College of the Law. “There’s clearly harm to state budgets, harm to state universities.”
Trump travel ban faces key test in multiple courtrooms
Trump travel ban faces key test in multiple courtrooms
Trump takes unconventional approach to communicating to the public about war in Iran
- The communications strategy opened Trump to criticism that he hadn’t done enough to explain the rationale and objectives of the war
Typical of an unconventional presidency, the Trump administration waited more than 48 hours to make any live, public communication to the American people about why it had decided to go to war with Iran.
President Donald Trump discussed why he launched the attack prior to a White House ceremony honoring military heroes on Monday but took no questions from reporters. Earlier in the day, Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth and Joint Chiefs of Staff Chairman Dan Caine briefed journalists at the Pentagon.
The two days previous, Trump delivered two pretaped statements that were released on Truth Social, the social media site owned by the president’s media company, and granted telephone interviews to more than a dozen journalists — several of which produced fragmented responses that, to some, clouded as much as they cleared up.
The communications strategy opened Trump to criticism that he hadn’t done enough to explain the rationale and objectives of the war, even as the American military suffered its first casualties. By contrast, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, who has teamed with the US against Iran, delivered two statements the day the war began and addressed reporters Monday at the site of a missile attack that killed nine people. The Israeli military has held multiple press briefings each day.
“The American people need a commander in chief, and he has been absent in that role,” Rahm Emanuel, White House chief of staff under President Barack Obama, said on CNN Monday. Emanuel, a Democrat, is contemplating a run for the presidency in 2028.
An unconventional strategy leads to criticism
Peter Baker, chief White House correspondent for The New York Times, wrote on social media that “after Trump launched a new war on Iran, he did not rush back to the White House to make an Oval Office address to rally the nation as other presidents have done. He stayed at Mar-a-Lago to attend a glitzy political fundraiser.”
That post provoked a response from Steven Cheung, White House communications director. “Imagine being a reporter so consumed with Trump Derangement Syndrome that he wants President Trump to mimic the failed policies of the past. The truth is that President Trump spent the majority of his time monitoring the situation in a secure facility, in constant contact with world leaders, and made multiple addresses to the nation that garnered hundreds of millions of views. He also took dozens of calls with reporters.”
The calls included one with Baker’s colleague at The Times, Zolan Kanno-Youngs. Trump’s mobile phone number is known to many of the reporters who cover him, and the president often takes their calls for on-the-spot interviews. Besides The Times, he spoke in the aftermath of the attack to journalists for ABC, CBS, NBC, CNN, CNBC, Fox News Channel, The Atlantic, The Washington Post, Axios, Politico and an Israeli television station.
Most of the calls were brief and marginally illuminating; Politico’s Dasha Burns said Trump answered but said he was too busy to talk. The public couldn’t hear what Trump said in the interviews and was dependent upon what the journalists chose to report on the conversations.
“I spoke to President Trump today and he told me that the operation in Iran is going to go very fast,” Libby Alon, a reporter for Channel 14 News in Israel, wrote about her interview on X. “It’s doing very well, and (will) make the people of Israel very happy, and the people of the world very happy.”
The Times reported that in its six-minute chat, Trump “offered several seemingly contradictory visions of how power might be transferred to a new government — or even whether the existing Iranian power structure would run that government or be overthrown.”
In one of his two conversations with Trump, ABC News’ Jonathan Karl said when he asked about the death of Iranian Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, the president said: “I got him before he got me. They tried twice. Well I got him first.” CNN’s Jake Tapper went on the air minutes after his conversation Monday, saying Trump told him “the big one is coming soon,” an apparent reference to a future attack.
Asked for comment, White House spokeswoman Anna Kelly said: “President Trump is the most transparent and accessible president in American history. The American people have never had a more direct and authentic relationship with a president of the United States than they have with President Trump.”
Hegseth briefing concentrates on friendly reporters
Pentagon reporters learned late Sunday about Hegseth’s briefing. Reporters from The Associated Press, Reuters, ABC, CBS, NBC, CNN, Fox News Channel and Stars & Stripes were permitted into the briefing room, but Hegseth did not call on them. Instead, he took questions from NewsNation and Trump-friendly outlets like the Daily Caller, Daily Wire, One America News and the Christian Broadcasting Network. Most mainstream news outlets left their regular stations at the Pentagon last fall rather than agree to Hegseth’s rules restricting their work.
Hegseth denounced the “foolishness” of people wanting to know details of the operation in advance, such as whether Americans would commit to more than air power, and said the operation would continue as long as it took to achieve objections. He initially ignored NBC News’ Courtney Kube when she called out a question: “President Trump put a four-week time limit on it. Are you saying he’s wrong?”
Later, Hegseth denounced Kube for asking “the typical NBC sort of gotcha-type question. President Trump has all the latitude in the world to talk about how long it might take — four weeks, two weeks, six weeks, it could move up, it could move back. We’re going to execute at his command the objectives he set out to achieve.”
Unlike Pentagon briefings in past administrations, reporters were given assigned seats, with the Trump-friendly outlets seated in front. Jennifer Griffin, Hegseth’s former colleague at Fox News Channel who left the Pentagon with other reporters after not accepting his new rules, was seated in the last row.
