AlexStar/iStock/Thinkstock(HONOLULU) — A federal judge in Hawaii has issued a nationwide temporary restraining order on President Donald Trump’s revised travel ban.
U.S. District Judge Derrick Watson issued his ruling Wednesday after hearing arguments on Hawaii’s request for a temporary restraining order involving the ban.
His ruling prevents the executive order from going into effect Thursday.
Watson said he will not stay his ruling should an appeal be pursued. “The Court declines to stay this ruling or hold it in abeyance should an emergency appeal of this order be filed,” he said.
At a rally in Nashville Wednesday night, President Trump slammed the decision as “an unprecedented judicial overreach.”
In arguing for the restraining order, the state of Hawaii alleged that the new executive order “began life as a Muslim ban,” and that the statements of President Trump and his advisers “provide direct evidence of the Executive Order’s discriminatory motivations.”
“The March 6, 2017 Executive Order was motivated by animus and a desire to discriminate on the basis of religion and/or national origin, nationality, or alienage,” the state contended.
The state also argued the ban would harm its tourism industry, as well as its ability to recruit foreign students and workers.
The Trump administration had argued that the plaintiffs were trying “to impugn the order using campaign statements” and that the court should not look beyond the stated purpose of the revised order, which had been substantially revised to exempt legal residents and current visa holders.
The administration asserted that statements made during the campaign by Trump and his surrogates were “irrelevant” and urged the judge not to look for “secret motives” of government officials in reaching his decision. Judge Watson, who was appointed to the bench by President Obama in 2012, issued a thorough rebuke of the administration’s position.
“The remarkable facts at issue here require no such impermissible inquiry,” Watson writes, referencing then-candidate Trump’s call for “a complete shutdown” of Muslim immigration and recent comments by Trump senior adviser Stephen Miller that the new order would result in “the same basic policy outcome for the country” as the first, now revoked, order.
“These plainly-worded statements, made in the months leading up to and contemporaneous with the signing of the Executive Order, and, in many cases, made by the Executive himself, betray the Executive Order’s stated secular purpose,” Watson writes. “Any reasonable, objective observer would conclude…that the stated secular purpose of the Executive Order is, at the very least, ‘secondary to a religious objective’ of temporarily suspending the entry of Muslims.”
Watson’s order capped off a whirlwind day of court hearings around the country, with plaintiffs in Maryland and Washington State also seeking to block the ban before it goes into effect.
The attorney general of Washington State, Bob Ferguson, whose lawsuit resulted in the injunction preventing implementation of the first version of the travel ban, praised the Hawaii order as “fantastic news.”
“Today’s rapidly evolving events show the strength of our growing coalition, from the eastern seaboard to the Hawaiian islands,” Ferguson wrote on Twitter.
Copyright © 2017, ABC Radio. All rights reserved.
