Trump’s Travel Ban 2.0 Goes Into Effect, Setting the Stage for SCOTUS Battle Over Executive Powers

The State Department issued new guidelines on Wednesday for revisions of the travel ban on peoples from six predominantly Muslim countries entering the United States. The stipulations went into effect at 8 p.m. Eastern time on Thursday.

According to the New York Times, the court said the ban could not be imposed on any person who had “a credible claim of a bona fide relationship with a person or entity in the United States”—language which raised concerns about how that phrase might potentially generate subjective interpretations and hair-splitting distinctions that could stand at odds with each other.

The Times looked into these semantic issues and the White House’s attempts at clarification:

The Trump administration has now made the definition explicit.

According to a diplomatic cable obtained by The New York Times, “close family” is “defined as a parent (including parent-in-law), spouse, child, adult son or daughter, son-in-law, daughter-in-law, sibling, whether whole or half. This includes step relationships.”

But it went on to state that “close family” does not include “grandparents, grandchildren, aunts, uncles, nieces, nephews, cousins, brothers-in-laws and sisters-in-law, fiancés and any other ‘extended’ family members.”

It is not clear how the administration arrived at the new definitions.

The guidelines come after the U.S. Supreme Court on Monday paved the way for certain parts of the travel ban to remain but imposed limits while the court examines the scope of presidential power over the border.

The limits imposed resulted in a far more limited travel ban than the version Trump proposed his first week in office as well as the later, revised iteration. But still, it represents a small victory for Trump, who was repeatedly shot down by lower courts for an attempt at a widespread ban on Muslims entering the country.

As the Times noted, the Supreme Court’s latest opinion “sets up a historic legal clash in which the justices will weigh the president’s power to set national security priorities against the need to protect individuals from discrimination based on their religious beliefs or national origin.”

Omar Jadwat of the American Civil Liberties Union told the paper he believes the newly issued guidelines are troubling, as they could create arbitrary definitions of family relationships. “[I]t means that everybody is going to be in the situation of kind of scrambling to understand whatever they put out, and work through the issues,” he said.

CNN reported that Thursday night’s rollout of the new travel ban was relatively quiet compared to the public response to the administration’s first attempt last January.

—Posted by Emily Wells.

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