President Donald Trump said Thursday that he will issue a new order restricting travel from nations the administration says are linked to terrorism rather than appeal a court hold on the current ban.
The administration, which has been losing court battles around the nation over the ban, promised the new order at a news conference and in written arguments filed with the 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals.
"As far as the new order, the new order is going to be very much tailored to the what I consider to be a very bad decision," Trump said of the appeals court's ruling last week blocking enforcement of the controversial restrictions on travelers from seven majority-Muslim countries.
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Trump did not clarify details of what would be in the new order, saying only that it would be "tailored" to the previous rulings issued by "bad" courts — most of which concluded that challenges to its constitutionality would likely prevail.
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The president also downplayed the chaos that erupted at airports around the world in the wake of the travel ban, as workers, students, people trying to visit families in the U.S. and others with valid visas were either denied permission to board planes or turned away after arriving in the U.S.
State Department officials said an estimated 60,000 visas were canceled. Trump blamed much of the turmoil at U.S. airports on a Delta Airlines computer outage.
"Let me tell you about the travel ban. We had a very smooth rollout of the travel ban. But we had a bad court. Got a bad decision," he said. "The rollout was perfect."
Given the plans for the new executive order, Trump administration officials said they would no longer pursue an appeal of the 9th Circuit's hold on the previous order.
"Rather than continuing this litigation," the administration said in a brief, "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."
The 9th Circuit's active judges had been expected to vote on whether to reconsider the previous action upholding the hold on the ban, taken by a three-member motions panel of the court, after the close of briefing Thursday.
Trump's initial executive order, signed seven days after he took office, prohibited holders of green cards and visas traveling abroad from re-entering the United States if they were citizens of Iran, Iraq, Libya, Somalia, Sudan, Syria or Yemen.
White House officials have indicated that a new order would most likely be designed to have no impact on current holders of U.S. visas, meaning that people who hold green cards or have student or work-related visas would be able to travel freely.
Dozens of lawsuits challenging the ban have been filed, producing myriad rulings that mainly went against the administration.
A federal judge in Seattle issued the most sweeping ruling, placing a nationwide hold on the moratorium in response to a challenge from the states of Washington and Minnesota.
That was the ruling that was appealed to the 9th Circuit, which decides federal legal matters for nine Western states.
Last week, following the motions panel's decision against the executive order, an unidentified judge on the 9th Circuit asked to have the decision reviewed by an 11-member panel, an action that generally occurs when a member of the court disagrees with a decision and wants a speedy appeal.
Washington and Minnesota contended the travel ban was hurting business and disrupting public universities and argued that it violated constitutional guarantees of due process and religious freedom.
The three-judge panel, which consisted of two Democratic appointees and one appointed by a Republican, ruled that the states were likely to prevail on their due process challenge.
The due process clause of the Fifth Amendment bars the federal government from restricting someone's travel without notice and a hearing, the panel said.
On Monday, a federal judge in Virginia halted enforcement of the ban in that state based on evidence the order was motivated by animus to Muslims in violation of the Constitution's establishment clause.