A federal judge has suspended Hawaii’s lawsuit against President Donald Trump challenging his executive order restricting travel from seven majority-Muslim countries and barring the admission of all refugees to the United States, so long as a nationwide injunction against the order remains in place.
On Friday, just hours after Hawaii’s attorney general filed a lawsuit against the Trump administration, a federal judge in Seattle issued a temporary restraining order against Trump’s travel ban in a separate but similar lawsuit filed by the state of Washington.
The Trump administration has appealed the ruling, and a panel of three judges for the 9th Circuit Court of Appeals heard oral arguments from both sides Monday. The court is expected to rule on whether to lift the injunction on Trump’s order sometime this week.
One of the three federal appeals judges ruling on whether to restore Trump’s travel ban is Judge Richard Clifton, who is based in Honolulu and known as a moderate conservative. Clifton was appointed by former President George W. Bush and unanimously confirmed by the U.S. Senate in 2002. He’s a former law partner at Honolulu’s Cades Schutte.
Hawaii’s attorney general, Doug Chin, filed an amicus brief in the Washington case, which means that the state’s legal arguments are before the 9th Circuit.
The court rejected the state’s request to join in the lawsuit as a party, but Chin said during a news conference Tuesday that he expects there will be further opportunities for Hawaii to join the Washington case as it progresses. Minnesota is already a party in the case.
The state lawsuits argue in part that Trump’s executive order is discriminatory against Muslims and violates various U.S. constitutional protections. Attorneys for the states have pointed to comments that Trump made during his campaign for president relating to barring Muslims from entering the country.
Trump’s executive order doesn’t spell out a ban on Muslims, but it gives entry preference to minority religions, which opponents of the order have argued amounts to religious discrimination in the Muslim-majority countries that the order targets.
Chin said that Hawaii’s lawsuit is similar to Washington’s but also lays out arguments for why Trump’s executive order violates two federal laws, the Immigration and Nationality Act
and the Administrative
Procedures Act.
Specifically, Trump’s Jan. 27 order banned immigrants for 90 days from Syria, Iraq, Iran, Libya, Somalia, Yemen and Sudan. The admission of Syrian refugees was indefinitely suspended, while the admission of all other refugees was suspended for
120 days.
Trump has vigorously defended his executive order, saying that it is needed to protect Americans against terrorism, while also attacking the Seattle judge for ruling in favor of the temporary restraining order.
After U.S. District Judge James Robart of Seattle suspended Trump’s travel restrictions Friday, Trump tweeted, “The opinion of this so-called judge, which essentially takes law-enforcement away from our country, is ridiculous and will be overturned!”
The president later tweeted that the judge and court system should be blamed if the country is hit with a terrorist attack.
“Just cannot believe a judge would put our country in such peril,” he tweeted Sunday. “If something happens blame him and court system. People pouring in. Bad!”
The president’s comments sparked outrage among Democrats and others concerned about the attacks on the judiciary.
Chin said Tuesday that Trump’s comments were a “form of bullying that I just don’t think is appropriate.”
Chin also said that even though his office supports “national security as much as anybody else,” Trump’s order didn’t make sense.
“The executive order right now is over-inclusive and under-inclusive. It’s over-inclusive in the sense that it doesn’t matter if you are a baby, if you are a grandmother, if you never committed a crime in your life, so long as you come from one of these Muslim-majority countries. Or for a Syrian refugee, you are not coming into the United States because we are concerned you are a terrorist,” said Chin.
He said it is under-inclusive because it doesn’t include other countries that are battling terrorist groups or “where there is a Trump hotel or business.”
“So just logically, on its face, the executive order doesn’t make sense,”
he said.
Chin acknowledged the lawsuit is taking a toll on his office’s resources. The AG’s office has enlisted the help of Washington, D.C., law firm Hogan Lovells. Chin said the firm is providing its services at half-price, but didn’t immediately have figures for how much his office is paying the firm from its litigation budget.
“From a resource standpoint we have been challenged to the very limits
— the pace and the amount of work that we have had to put into having to deal with just this executive order has been phenomenal,” he said. “But I also feel very determined that it’s what we need to do in order to be able to protect Hawaii’s interests against unconstitutional and illegal behavior.”
