United States

The travel ban

Immigration was also the focus of another controversial executive order early in Trump’s term. Issued in late January, the order suspended immigration from seven Muslim-majority countries and, in the eyes of many, effectively fulfilled Trump’s campaign promise to institute a “Muslim ban.” This so-called travel ban was immediately greeted with widespread protests at U.S. airports. By early February, enforcement of the ban had been enjoined nationwide by order of a district court in Washington state. After the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals declined to stay the order, in March the Trump administration superseded the first executive order with a second that was crafted to get around the constitutional challenges to the first that were grounded in the assertion that it violated both the due process clause and the establishment-of-religion clause. Enforcement of the new ban—which removed Iraq from the list of countries involved and narrowed the categories of affected persons—was blocked by injunctions issued by district courts in Hawaii and Maryland that were largely upheld in May and June by the Fourth and Ninth Circuit Courts of Appeals, respectively. In June the U.S. Supreme Court put these cases on the docket for its October 2017 term and in the interim removed the injunctions for “foreign nationals who lack any bona fide relationship with a person or entity in the United States.”