Supreme Court Rules in Favor of Trump Administration on Travel Ban

In a 5-4 decision, the Supreme Court on June 26 reversed a federal court’s judgment against the third version of the Trump administration’s travel ban, saying the president had the authority to restrict entry to the U.S. from countries whose governments pose national security problems — and that the prohibition wasn’t discriminatory.

“There is persuasive evidence that the entry suspension has a legitimate grounding in national security concerns, quite apart from any religious hostility,” Chief Justice John Roberts wrote in the majority decision. The court returned the case to the lower courts for a further ruling.

Previous versions of the ban, which limited travel to the U.S. from Muslim-majority countries, had been blocked by lower courts, with plaintiffs alleging unconstitutional anti-Muslim bias. As a candidate in 2015, President Trump issued a statement calling for a “total and complete shutdown of Muslims entering the United States until our country’s representatives can figure out what the hell is going on.” 

The current version of the ban includes limits on travel into the U.S. by citizens of two non-Muslim countries, North Korea and Venezuela, as well as Muslim-majority Syria, Iran, Yemen, Somalia and Libya. (Restrictions on Chad were initially included, but were removed this past spring when the administration found the country had improved its procedures.) While noting that it took “no view on the soundness of the policy,” the Supreme Court ruled that Hawaii’s constitutional challenge to portions of the policy “was not likely to succeed,” and said an initial injunction had been “an abuse of discretion.”

In the decision, Roberts said the ban was premised on “legitimate purposes”: to prevent the entry of those from countries who can’t be adequately vetted, and inducing other nations to improve their practices. Roberts said the ban “reflects the results of a worldwide review process undertaken by multiple Cabinet officials and their agencies,” includes provisions for countries’ inclusion on the list to be regularly reevaluated, and only applies to a small percentage of the world’s Muslim population. “The text says nothing about religion,” he wrote.

Sonia Sotomayor wrote in a dissent, “What the unrebut­ted evidence actually shows is that a reasonable observer would conclude, quite easily, that the primary purpose and function of the Proclamation is to disfavor Islam by banning Muslims from entering the country.”

In the May 2017 documentary Bannon’s War, FRONTLINE went inside the chaotic rollout of President Trump’s initial suspension of travel into the U.S. by refugees and citizens from seven majority-Muslim nations on January 27, 2017.

 

As this excerpt explores, it was no accident that the announcement — engineered by Trump’s now-departed chief strategist Stephen Bannon – happened with little warning on a Friday afternoon.

“Bannon knew that people who were opposed to this policy would be enraged, and most of them would have Saturday and Sunday off from work, so they could get out there and they could protest and they could get angry,” says Joshua Green of Bloomberg BusinessWeek.

Why was that Bannon’s goal? Because the resulting media coverage of the massive protests would telegraph to Trump’s voters that he was keeping his campaign-trail promise to restrict Muslims from entering the U.S.

“They knew that the protests would come, they knew the media would erupt,” Robert Costa of The Washington Post told FRONTLINE. “It’s what they wanted.”

“Bannon thinks, ‘This is great. We’re killing it. We’re winning. We’re doing everything that we said we would. We are beating down the establishment and the liberals into submission. We are literally making America great again,’” former Breitbart spokesman Kurt Bardella told FRONTLINE.