A federal appeals court has rejected the Trump administration’s limited view of who is allowed into the U.S. under the president’s travel ban.
A three-judge panel of the 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals ruled Thursday that grandparents, cousins and similarly close relations of people in the U.S. shouldn’t be prevented from coming to the country.
The court also said refugees accepted by a resettlement agency shouldn’t be banned.
In June, the U.S. Supreme Court said the 90-day ban could be enforced pending arguments set for October and it went into force in its latest state at the end of June.
But the justices said it shouldn’t apply to visitors who have a ‘bona fide relationship’ with people or organizations in the U.S., such as close family ties or a job offer.
The government interpreted such relations to include immediate family members and in-laws, but not grandparents, cousins, aunts and uncles.
Another blow: The travel ban is set for a full hearing in the Supreme Court in October. Trump’s administration was appealing against a ruling on how ‘close relatives’ was defined in the wake of the Supreme Court allowing it to go into effect in a restricted form at the end of June
The State Department had already expanded its definition of ‘close family’ to include grandparents and other relatives that constitute a bona fide U.S. relationship for visa applicants and refugees from six mainly Muslim nations.
In response to a federal judge’s order in July, the department instructed U.S. diplomats to consider grandparents, grandchildren, brothers-in-law, sisters-in-law, aunts and uncles, nephews and nieces and first cousins to meet the criteria for applicants from the six countries to receive a U.S. visa.
Those had been omitted by the department after the Supreme Court partially upheld the Trump administration’s travel ban in June.
Under the rules applicants from the six countries have to prove a bona fide relationship with a person or entity in the U.S. to be exempt from the ban.
The move followed a ruling by a federal in Honolulu that grandparents and other relatives should not be barred under the temporary travel ban.
The order, by U.S. District Judge Derrick Watson in Honolulu, dealt a fresh courtroom defeat for Trump as the Republican president seeks to toughen U.S. immigration policy.
The state of Hawaii had asked Watson to narrowly interpret a U.S. Supreme Court ruling that revived parts of Trump’s March 6 executive order banning people from the six countries for 90 days.
Watson declined to put on hold his ruling exempting grandparents and other relatives from the ban.
The administration had appealed his ruling although it had fallen in line with it.
Watson harshly criticized the government’s definition of close family relations as ‘the antithesis of common sense,’ in his ruling.
‘Common sense, for instance, dictates that close family members be defined to include grandparents. Indeed, grandparents are the epitome of close family members,’ he wrote.
A Justice Department spokeswoman declined to comment. Neal Katyal, an attorney for the state of Hawaii, called the ruling a ‘sweeping victory’ on social network Twitter.
Watson (above) harshly criticized the government’s definition of close family relations as ‘the antithesis of common sense,’ in his ruling
The U.S. Supreme Court last month let the ban on travel from the six countries go forward with a limited scope, saying it could not apply to anyone with a credible ‘bona fide relationship’ with a U.S. person or entity.
The Trump administration then decided that spouses, parents, children, fiancés and siblings would be exempt from the ban, while grandparents and other family members traveling from Iran, Libya, Somalia, Sudan, Syria and Yemen would be barred.
The Trump administration also said that all refugees without a close family tie would be blocked from the country for four months.
Trump said the measure was necessary to prevent attacks. However, the state of Hawaii sued to stop it, disputing its security rationale and saying it discriminated against Muslims.
Hawaii’s attorney general Douglas Chin asked Watson to issue an injunction allowing grandparents and other family members to travel to the United States. Hawaii and refugee groups argue that resettlement agencies have a ‘bona fide’ relationship with the refugees they help, sometimes over the course of years.
The Justice Department said its rules were properly grounded in immigration law.
The roll-out of the narrowed version of the ban was more subdued than in January, when Trump first signed a more expansive version of the order. That sparked protests and chaos at airports around the country and the world.