An appeals court deals another blow to Donald Trump’s travel ban

By S.M. | NEW YORK

THE president’s plan to ban travel from six Muslim-majority countries, the Fourth Circuit Court of Appeals said on May 25th, “drips with religious intolerance, animus and discrimination”. By a 10-3 vote, the appeals court based in Richmond rebuffed Donald Trump’s attempt to have his second try at a travel ban reinstated after it was blocked by a Maryland judge in mid-March. The pause on the entry of refugees, and on travellers from Iran, Libya, Somalia, Sudan, Syria and Yemen, “speaks with vague words of national security” and dials back some of the more egregious aspects of the first ban, the court ruled, but abandons “one of our most cherished founding principles—that government shall not establish any religious orthodoxy, or favour or disfavour one religion over another”.

The centrepiece of the 67-page majority opinion, written by the court’s chief judge, Roger Gregory, is a traipse through a 17-month-long string of declarations, tweets and comments from the president and his advisers which reveal the true motive behind the travel restrictions. The story begins with Mr Trump’s campaign-trail call, in December 2015, for a “total and complete shutdown” on Muslims entering America. It wends its way to the following summer, when Mr Trump appeared on NBC’s “Meet the Press” in July 2016. Judge Gregory recounts that when Mr Trump was asked “whether he had ‘pulled back’ on his ‘Muslim ban’,” Mr Trump replied, “I actually don’t think it’s a rollback. In fact, you could say it’s an expansion. I’m looking now at territories. People were so upset when I used the word Muslim. Oh, you can’t use the word Muslim. Remember this. And I’m okay with that, because I’m talking territory instead of Muslim.” In another flourish foreshadowing the trouble his eventual order would face in court, Mr Trump added: “Our constitution is great...Now, we have a religious, you know, everybody wants to be protected. And that’s great. And that’s the wonderful part of our constitution. I view it differently.”