Washington State Asks Federal Judge To Block President Trump’s Revised Travel Order

First Hawaii. Now, Washington.

According to this, Washington state is asking a federal judge to block President Trump’s revised travel order, which imposes a 90–day suspension of entry to those coming from six countries (Syria, Iran, Libya, Somalia, Sudan and Yemen) and halts refugee admissions for 120 days. (The order does not apply to legal residents with visas.)

Washington state will ask judge to halt Trump’s new travel ban: source https://t.co/Z0jAJwB8cx

— Reuters Top News (@Reuters) March 9, 2017

In an announcement Thursday, Washington state Attorney General Bob Ferguson contended that Judge James Robart’s Feb. 3 ruling — which suspended Trump’s first ban nationwide until a challenge brought by Washington and Minnesota could be heard in court — ought to cover the second ban, despite revisions that narrowed who would be affected.

Trump’s revised order was written to stand up in court, and it looks like it’ll be put to the test.

“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 ahead of the announcement. “Yes, the revised one is more narrow — that’s a success. But the core constitutional problems remain the same.”

 

Ferguson added: “The intent behind the executive order targeting those Muslim countries still remains, and that is unconstitutional.”

 

…

 

“The test is whether or not a motivating factor behind the travel ban was an improper religious bias against Muslims,” Ferguson said. “That doesn’t mean in some other context with immigration, he doesn’t have broad powers. He does.

 

“But for this particular travel ban, he’s going to run into this problem over and over again.”

For the 100th time, the ban has nothing to do with religion. Those are terror-laden countries, period. The previous order affected less than 15 percent of the world’s Muslims. This order didn’t even include Iraq, so the percentage is much less.

Guess we’ll see where this goes.