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June 26, 2018.
Chief Justice Roberts said that President Trump had provided sufficient evidence of national security concerns. In a dissent, liberal Justice Sotomayor called those concerns a “facade” for Islamophobia.
The US Supreme Court ruled 5-4 on Tuesday to allow President Donald Trump to keep his travel ban against people from several mostly Muslim countries. The conservative majority on the court agreed that the “Muslim ban,”as it has been called, does not violate US immigration law.
Chief Justice John Roberts wrote in the court’s opinion that the president had “set forth a sufficient national security justification” to stop many people from travelling to the US from Somalia, Iran, Yemen, Syria, Libya, Chad, North Korea and Venezuela.
He added, however, that the court had “no view on the soundness of the policy.”
The decision marks what can be seen as the first major policy victory for President Trump since taking office in January 2017. In a statement, Trump called the ruling a “profound vindication,” and a “tremendous victory for the American people.”
Sotomayor: Travel ban hurts US citizens
In a dissenting opinion, Justice Sonia Sotomayor said the ruling “leaves undisturbed a policy first advertised openly and unequivocally as a ‘total and complete shutdown of Muslims entering the United States’ because the policy now masquerades behind a facade of national-security concerns.”
She added that any “reasonable observer would conclude that the Proclamation was motivated by anti-Muslim animus.” She also accused her five colleagues who voted to uphold the ban of “ignoring the facts, misconstruing our legal precedent, and turning a blind eye to the pain and suffering the Proclamation inflicts upon countless families and individuals, many of whom are United States citizens.”
Travel ban in the US hinders asylum
Trump’s “Muslim ban” has gone through several iterations and been struck down by federal courts in Hawaii and Maryland before its final version emerged in September 2017, banning entry for most people from the eight aforementioned nations into the United States. It has been decried by detractors as a blantantly Islamophobic move from President Trump, and critics have also highlighted that no one who has committed acts of terror in the United States has come from any of those five countries. DWTV