Three months after the Supreme Court first temporarily OK’d a partial revival of the Trump administration’s second travel ban, the White House is returning to the high court to ask it to overturn a lower court ruling preventing full enforcement of a portion of the ban that temporarily blocks refugees from entering the US.
According to the Hill, the Department of Justice on Monday asked the Supreme Court to stay the part of a ruling last week by the 9th Circuit Court of Appeals that barred the government from prohibiting refugees that have formal assurances from resettlement agencies or are in the U.S. Refugee Admissions Program from entering the US.
While the 9th Circuit also said in its opinion that the government could not ban grandparents, aunts, uncles and other extended family members of a person in the U.S. from entering the country, as Politico notes, the administration decline to asked the high court to overturn this part of the ruling – a sign that the administration has decided to let it go.
In his request to the high court, Solicitor General Jeffrey Wall said the part of the ruling concerning what constitutes a “bona fide” relationship with someone in the US is “less stark” than the nullification of the order’s refugee provision.”
“Unlike students who have been admitted to study at an American university, workers who have accepted jobs at an American company, and lecturers who come to speak to an American audience, refugees do not have any freestanding connection to resettlement agencies, separate and apart from the refugee-admissions process itself, by virtue of the agencies’ assurance agreement with the government,” Wall wrote.
“Nor can the exclusion of an assured refugee plausibly be thought to “burden” a resettlement agency in the relevant sense.”
This is the second time the administration has asked the high court to intervene since it initially permitted a “partial” version of the travel ban in June. In July, when a Hawaii district court issued essentially the same ruling on the ban that the 9th circuit issued last week, Trump asked the Supreme Court to intervene. They eventually decided to strike down the part of the Hawaii judge's ruling concerning refugees, while allowing his expansion of what constituted a "nona fide" relationship to stand – allowing the entry of grandparents, aunts, uncles, neices, nephews and other more distant family members to use their status to justify entry into the US. It's notable that this is essentially the same outcome the Trump administration is seeking this time around.
via http://ift.tt/2xsb0Q2 Tyler Durden