A U.S. Appeals Court on Monday upheld a lower court ruling that blocks President Donald Trump’s executive order banning travellers from six Muslim-majority countries.

 The US Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals in Seattle was the second appeals court to uphold an earlier court’s move to put the executive order on hold while challenges against its constitutionality move forward.

 The Trump administration had appealed to the court over the earlier ruling by a federal judge in Hawaii.

 The court had halted implementation of the entire executive order, which also sought to block issuances of new refugee admissions from around the world for 120 days.

 A separate decision on the order in the Fourth Circuit has already been appealed to the U.S. Supreme Court. </s> The Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals has just released a unanimous ruling denying President Trump’s motion for a stay of the lower court injunction against President Trump’s Executive Order temporarily suspending Visa’s from seven nations of concern:

We are looking for the full ruling document. UPDATE: FULL RULING pdf Below

President Trump has two options on this specific XO, request direct appeal on this decision to Supreme Court Justice John Brennan who oversees the Ninth Circuit, or take the appeal to the full Supreme Court.

Additionally, President Trump may choose to rewrite the initial executive order and clarify the purpose and intent to avoid judicial challenge. </s> Government attorneys appealed Thursday, March 30th to the 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals. It comes the day after U.S. District Judge Derrick Watson issued a longer-lasting hold on key provisions of Trump’s executive order.

The government says in court documents that the appeal also applies to a temporary order that Watson previously issued that halted the suspension of new visas for people from six Muslim-majority countries and a freeze on the U.S. refugee program.

Hawaii Attorney General Douglas Chin says he expected the government to appeal.

Watson’s written order says he won’t suspend the ruling for an appeal. </s> A federal appeals court Thursday upheld one of two bans on enforcing President Donald Trump's executive order restricting travel from six predominately Muslim countries.

The Fourth Circuit Court of Appeals, based in Richmond, Virginia, voted 10-3 to uphold a ruling by a federal judge in Maryland who declared in March that the president's revised travel order amounted to unconstitutional religious discrimination.

Campaign statements by Donald Trump, who originally called for a ban on Muslim immigration, "provide direct, specific evidence" of what motivated his executive orders — "President Trump's desire to exclude Muslims from the United States," the appeals court said.

The revised executive order "cannot be divorced from the cohesive narrative linking it to the animus that inspired it," the court said in an opinion written by Chief Judge Roger Gregory.

The Justice Department urged the court to lift the ban on enforcement. It said the executive order had a legitimate national security purpose, allowing the government to assess the reliability of background information on visa applicants from six countries associated with terrorism.

But that argument, the court said, "is belied by evidence in the record that President Trump issued the first executive order without consulting with the relevant security agencies."

After President Trump's first executive order was blocked in court, the president signed the second one, imposing a 90-day ban on travel from Iran, Sudan, Syria, Libya, Somalia, and Yemen.

Judge Paul Niemeyer, writing in dissent for himself and Judges Dennis Shedd and Steven Agee, said the majority wrongly gave itself the power to "search for evidence suggesting bad faith."

As for the government's claim that the president acted to protect national security, the dissenters said "none of the facts or conditions recited as reasons for the issuance of the executive order have been challenged as untrue or illegitimate."

In addition to the Maryland judge's ruling, the subject of Thursday's appeals court ruling, the executive order was also blocked by a federal judge in Hawaii. The Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals heard oral arguments May 15 on the government's efforts to lift that stay.

Both appeals courts would have to rule in the administration's favor to allow enforcement of the revised executive order. An appeal to the US Supreme Court seems certain, but it is unlikely the justices would hear the case before the fall.

Neither the White House nor the Justice Department had an immediate response to the appeals court ruling.

The American Civil Liberties Union, which is representing a group of refugee aid organizations and Muslim residents whose overseas relatives are seeking visas, declared victory on Twitter after the announcement, saying, "We won in 4th circuit Muslim ban case!" </s> President Donald Trump said his new immigration executive order will be tailored to the federal court decision that paused his travel ban.

Trump said the tailoring is currently being worked out by his lawyers and will be rolled out next week.

“The new order is going to be very much tailored to what I consider to be a very bad decision,” said Trump during a news conference, referring to a decision by the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals that blocked his travel ban earlier this month.

Meanwhile, the Justice Department filed a brief Thursday telling the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals that it does not need a larger panel of judges to rehear its failed emergency challenge to a lower court’s temporary suspension of Trump’s executive order on immigration because a new order is on the way.

The Justice Department wrote at length about the “seriously flawed” Ninth Circuit ruling from last week, but neverthless said: “(r)ather than continuing this litigation, the President intends in the near future to rescind the order and replace it with a new, substantially revised executive order to eliminate what the panel erroneously thought were constitutional concerns.”

“In so doing, the President will clear the way for immediately protecting the country rather than pursuing further, potentially time-consuming litigation,” it added.

Questions have swirled over what the Trump administration would do this week after a three-judge panel on the Ninth Circuit refused to lift a federal judge’s temporary restraining order on Trump’s executive order barring foreign nationals from Iran, Sudan, Libya, Somalia, Syria, Iraq and Yemen from entering the country for 90 days, all refugees for 120 days and all refugees from Syria indefinitely.

Last Friday, an unidentified judge on the Ninth Circuit requested that the full court vote on whether to rehear the decision reached by the three-judge panel. Such requests are not uncommon, but the call for a vote came at time when the Justice Department’s position on pursuing the appeal was uncertain.

The states that brought the lawsuit — Washington and Minnesota — said in their court filing on Thursday that there is no basis for rehearing the case.

And while the nation waits on a new or modified executive order on immigration from the Trump administration, at least one federal court is barreling ahead on litigation over the original one.

US District Court Judge James Robart in Seattle — the judge who originally halted the key provisions of the travel ban — denied a request from the Trump administration earlier this week to postpone any further proceedings in his court, which means the parties will now proceed to the discovery phase of the case. </s> (CN) – The Ninth Circuit on Monday became the second federal appeals court to uphold a stay of President Donald Trump’s revised travel ban, even as he presses the Supreme Court to reinstate it.

Monday’s decision follows a May 25 ruling by the Fourth Circuit that concluded Trump intended to discriminate against Muslims from the six countries he targeted in his executive order.

The administration on June 1 asked the U.S. Supreme Court to let the ban take effect while the justices decide whether to review the Fourth Circuit ruling.

The three-judge Ninth Circuit panel ruled that Trump exceeded the scope of his authority in issuing the revised travel ban and largely upheld a ruling in Hawaii federal court that prevented the implementation of a ban on all travelers from six Muslim-majority countries.

“Immigration, even for the President, is not a one-person show,” the 86-page opinion states. “The President must make a sufficient finding that the entry of these classes of people would be ‘detrimental to the interests of the United States.’”

The ruling marks the second defeat for the Trump administration in the Ninth Circuit, with both decisions focusing on the presence of unconstitutional religious discrimination against Muslims embedded in each executive order. The first one was issued a week after Trump assumed office and a second, revised travel ban came in early March.

In the first case, the state of Washington sued the Trump administration, saying the ban was a thinly veiled attempt at harming Muslims. U.S. District Court Judge James Robart granted Washington a temporary restraining order, preventing implementation of the ban. The Ninth Circuit refused in February to reinstate the first travel ban.

Rather than appealing, the Trump administration revised the travel ban in a new executive order issued March 6.

This time around, Hawaii sued and U.S. District Court Judge Derrick Watson granted a temporary restraining order for similar reasons.

After Watson’s ruling, U.S. Attorney General Jeff Sessions criticized it by saying he was “amazed that a judge sitting on an island in the Pacific can issue an order that stops the President of the United States from what appears to be clearly his statutory and constitutional power.”

Monday’s Ninth Circuit ruling will most likely be appealed to the Supreme Court, which is already weighing whether to take up the Fourth Circuit appeal. </s> In a stinging rebuke to President Donald Trump, a U.S. appeals court refused on Thursday to reinstate his temporary travel ban on people from six Muslim-majority nations, setting the stage for a possible legal showdown in the Supreme Court.

The decision, written by Chief Judge Roger Gregory, described Trump’s executive order in forceful terms, saying it uses “vague words of national security, but in context drips with religious intolerance, animus, and discrimination.”

The White House declined comment and referred questions to the U.S. Justice Department, which did not immediately respond to a request for comment. The administration had said the temporary travel ban would prevent terrorist attacks.

In its 10-3 ruling, the U.S. 4th Circuit Court of Appeals said challengers of the ban, including refugee groups and individuals, were likely to succeed on their claim that the order violates the U.S. Constitution’s bar against favoring one religion over another.

The case could be appealed to the U.S. Supreme Court, which could make the final decision. The government could also file an emergency application seeking to put the order into effect while the litigation continues.

Gregory cited statements by Trump during the 2016 presidential election calling for a “Muslim ban.” The judge wrote that a reasonable observer would likely conclude the order’s “primary purpose is to exclude persons from the United States on the basis of their religious beliefs.”

The government had argued that the court should not take into account Trump’s comments on the campaign trail since they occurred before he took office on Jan. 20. But the appeals court rejected that view, saying they provide a window into the motivations for Trump’s action in government.

The appeals court questioned a government argument that the president has wide authority to halt the entry of people to the United States.

“Congress granted the President broad power to deny entry to aliens, but that power is not absolute. It cannot go unchecked when, as here, the President wields it through an executive edict that stands to cause irreparable harm to individuals across this nation,” the majority opinion said.

The Virginia-based appeals court was reviewing a March ruling by Maryland-based federal judge Theodore Chuang that blocked part of Trump’s March 6 executive order barring people from Iran, Libya, Somalia, Sudan, Syria and Yemen for 90 days while the government put in place stricter visa screening.

A similar ruling against Trump’s policy from a Hawaii-based federal judge is still in place. That ruling went farther than Chuang’s order, blocking a section of the travel ban that also suspended refugee admissions for four months. The San Francisco-based 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals is reviewing that decision.

Trump has lashed out at the judges and courts that have ruled against him, saying the 9th Circuit has a “terrible” record and calling its rulings on his policies “ridiculous.”

The March ban was Trump’s second effort to implement travel restrictions through an executive order. The first, issued on Jan. 27, led to chaos and protests at airports before it was blocked by courts.

The second order was intended to overcome the legal issues posed by the original ban, but it was blocked by judges before it could go into effect on March 16.

In a concurring opinion on Thursday, Judge Stephanie Thacker wrote that the administration did nothing to distance itself from the first order, describing the revised ban as “the proverbial wolf in sheep’s clothing.”

Chief Judge Gregory, who wrote the majority opinion, was first installed in a recess appointment by Democratic President Bill Clinton and then nominated to the same post by Republican former president George W. Bush.

Nine other judges appointed by Democrats agreed to block the travel ban, while three Republican-appointed judges dissented.

The dissenting judges said the executive order was constitutional and a valid exercise of presidential authority, and that Trump’s campaign statements should not have come into play. The order itself “contains no reference to religion whatsoever,” Judge Paul Niemeyer wrote.

Two other 4th Circuit judges, both appointed by Republicans, were recused from the case. </s> A federal appeals court in Richmond, Virginia, has declined to re-instate President Donald Trump’s executive order limiting travel from six predominantly Muslim countries for three months.

In a ruling Thursday, the Fourth Circuit Court of Appeals said the order did amount to a Muslim ban: “Laid bare, this Executive Order is no more than what the President promised before and after his election: naked invidious discrimination against Muslims,” the appeals court judges said in their 205-page ruling.

The panel of 13 judges ruling in the case cited Trump’s tweets, television interviews and statements posted on his campaign website as evidence of his intent.

The panel heard arguments in the case in early May. An attorney for the government had argued that the Trump administration's second attempt to curb travelers and immigrants from some majority-Muslim countries had nothing to do with religion.

In March, a federal judge in Maryland blocked the travel ban, which itself was a revised version of one initially issued in January that was tweaked after encountering legal roadblocks. The appeals court judges did not think the second version was an improvement: “Significantly, in revising the order, the executive branch did not attempt to walk away from its previous discriminatory order. Instead, it simply attempted to effectuate the same discrimination through a slightly different vehicle -- the proverbial wolf in sheep’s clothing.”

The Trump administration’s next recourse is to take the case to the Supreme Court. Appeals court documents say the administration has 90 days to do file an appeal.

A second appeals court, the Ninth Circuit in San Francisco, is also considering an appeal of a stay against the travel order, this one issued by a judge in Hawaii. But any ruling from that court has been rendered moot by Thursday’s Fourth Circuit ruling. </s> SAN FRANCISCO (AP) – A federal appeals court in San Francisco has refused to reinstate President Donald Trump’s ban on travelers from seven predominantly Muslim nations.

The 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals on Thursday wouldn’t block a lower-court ruling that suspended the ban and allowed previously barred travelers to enter the U.S. An appeal to the U.S. Supreme Court is possible.

U.S. District Judge James Robart in Seattle issued a temporary restraining order halting the ban last week after Washington state and Minnesota sued. The Justice Department appealed to the 9th Circuit.

Government lawyers argued that the ban was a “lawful exercise” of the president’s authority and that the seven countries have raised terrorism concerns.

The states said Trump’s executive order unconstitutionally blocked entry based on religion.
The appeal of the Trump administration is denied as the 9th US Circuit Court of Appeals said it would not block a lower-court ruling that brought the president's executive order to a halt.