The Supreme Court of the United States ruled Wednesday that President Donald Trump’s controversial travel ban can remain in place as challenges to the presidential measure crawl through lower courts.
Last month the nation’s top court partially lifted an injunction on Trump’s ban on people traveling to the United States from countries rife with Islamic terror and agreed to hear an appeal on lower court rulings that blocked the ban during its fall term. The decision, a win for the Trump administration, allowed the the government to begin barring people from Iran, Libya, Somalia, Sudan, Syria, and Yemen who cannot demonstrate that they have a reason to travel to the United States from entering the nation.
That ruling came with the stipulation that people having a “bona fide relationship” to the United States be unaffected by the ban.
The Trump Justice Department sought clarification from SCOTUS on what constitutes a “bona fide relationship,” but the court declined to elaborate.
Conservative Justices Clarence Thomas, Samuel Alito and Neil Gorsuch dissented against the decision to avoid hammering down concise parameters for what relationships should allow entry.
Some media outlets are reading the SCOTUS move as a loss for Trump because it allows people from the ban nations to enter the U.S. by digging for American connections in their family trees.
But another portion of the Court’s Wednesday ruling is far more significant. Justices blocked a lower court’s ruling that would have opened the nation’s doors to thousands of refugees over the next several months by allowing anyone assigned to a U.S. resettlement organization to enter the country.
Thanks to the ruling, Trump can for now make good on his promise to shift U.S. immigration policy away from the open borders approach that is currently causing problems throughout Europe.
The SCOTUS decision to allow portions of the travel ban to stand also shows that lower court questions concerning its constitutionality are moot, making it very likely that SCOTUS will rule more in Trump’s favor than not when it hears arguments on the ban in October.
A ruling declaring the travel ban both constitutional and a benefit to national security would be a massive blow to presidential detractors who claim it is simply a mean-spirited display of racism and Islamophobia.
In addition, allowing Trump’s full ban to stand would throw a massive wrench in an ongoing globalist plan to flood the U.S. with refugees to further a multicultural agenda designed to reshape the U.S. identity.
More on that from Bob Livingston: Immigration has become the seminal issue of our time