US District Judge Donald Watson blocked the ban just hours before it came into effect.
Donald Trump’s attempts to impose a travel ban restricting entry to the United States for people from a number of Muslim-majority countries has been thwarted for a second time in a matter of months.
Just hours before a revised travel ban signed by Donald Trump had been due to come into effect, US District Judge Derrick Watson ruled that the state of Hawaii had established that “irreparable injury is likely if the requested relief is not issued, and that the balance of the equities and public interest counsel in favor of granting the requested relief”.
Watson’s ruling comes after Trump’s initial ban, which restricted entry to the US from seven countries (Iraq wasn’t included in Trump’s revised ban) was suspended by a Washington state district court judge on 3 February after it was the cause of chaos at airports throughout the US and beyond in its first week.
Not surprisingly, the US president has come out fighting in response to the latest developments, telling an audience in Nashville, Tennessee, that it was a “terrible ruling” and that he was going to fight it all the way to the Supreme Court.
“We’re going to fight this terrible ruling,” he said.
“We’re going to take this as far as we need to, right up to the Supreme Court …
“I think we ought to go back to the first one (travel ban) and go all the way … We’re gonna win it, we’re gonna win it.”
President Trump rails against a federal court ruling blocking the new travel ban https://t.co/y6BFZHfYm9 https://t.co/IpUi6ifcjN
— CNN (@CNN) March 16, 2017
By suggesting he was going to revert to the original travel ban and by suggesting that the most recent executive order was only a “watered down” version of the first one, Trump may, according to The Guardian, be digging something of a legal hole for himself.
The comments made by Trump, it has been suggested, could be used against him by human rights lawyers to prove that he is pursuing a ‘Muslim ban’, which a number of federal courts have found to be in breach of the US constitution.
