It’s no surprise that the Supreme Court allowed Travel Ban 3.0 to remain in place, particularly given that the justices allowed Ban 2.0 to go into effect a year ago and this one last fall. This third version specifically carves out those with green cards, provides for waivers for those with special cases (family, medical emergencies, business ties, etc.), and also was tailored based on national-security considerations, to which the Court typically defers. One can disagree, as I do, with some of the policy judgments inherent in this executive action, but as a matter of law, the president — any president — gets a wide berth here.
The Court considered the president’s statements regarding this policy but ultimately had to apply a deferential standard; given the legitimate justifications explicitly set out in the “proclamation” announcing Travel Ban 3.0, the Court could not preference campaign rhetoric and tweets over legal documents in this context. “While we of course ‘do not defer to the Government’s reading of the First Amendment,’ ” Chief Justice John Roberts’s majority opinion says, citing Holder v. Humanitarian Law Project (2010), “the Executive’s evaluation of the underlying facts is entitled to appropriate weight, particularly in the context of litigation involving ‘sensitive and weighty interests of national security and foreign affairs.’ ”
Moreover, Congress set out a very deferential statutory regime. The majority opinion explains:
Read the rest of this post →By its plain language, §1182(f) grants the President broad discretion to suspend the entry of aliens into the United States. The President lawfully exercised that discretion based on his findings—following a worldwide, multi-agency review—that entry of the covered aliens would be detrimental to the national interest. And plaintiffs’ attempts to identify a conflict with other provisions in the INA, and their appeal to the statute’s purposes and legislative history, fail to overcome the clear statutory language.