Will the justices, many of whom worked in the executive branch, hold the president’s words against him?
President Trump’s “travel ban”—the two successive executive orders barring entry of persons from selected Muslim-majority countries—is headed for The Show.
For those scoring at home, the first travel ban won one—in a district court in Massachusetts—and lost three, in district courts in Virginia and Seattle, and then in the Ninth Circuit before being withdrawn. The revised ban so far has gone 0-3. District courts in Maryland and Hawaii both enjoined it, and Thursday the Court of Appeals for the Fourth Circuit affirmed the Maryland court’s injunction.
Because the Fourth Circuit’s decision was “en banc”—meaning decided by a full-court panel of 13 judges rather than the normal three-judge panel—there’s nowhere to go but the Supreme Court, which is virtually certain to grant review. In its current form, it bans entry in the U.S. by nationals of six majority-Muslim countries—Iran, Libya, Somalia, Sudan, Syria, and Yemen—for at least 90 days until the executive can determine whether those countries can provide enough information to U.S. authorities about individuals to satisfy a new system that Trump called “extreme vetting.”
Ta-Nehisi Coates is a national correspondent for The Atlantic, where he writes about culture, politics, and social issues. He is the author of The Beautiful Struggle and Between the World and Me.
