The state of Hawaii is asking a federal judge to block Donald Trump’s latest Muslim ban, which constitutional scholars have noted “has roughly the same grossly disproportionate impact on Muslims that Bans 1.0 and 2.0 had.” The state tells U.S. District Court Judge Derrick Watson that Muslim ban 3.0 “replicates all of the legal flaws evident in its precursors” and “still fails, despite its elaborate rationalizations, to make any ‘finding’ remotely adequate to support its sweeping ban of millions of foreign nationals”:
The updated ban — set to take effect next week — is a continuation of President Donald Trump’s “promise to exclude Muslims from the United States,” Hawaii said in court documents filed Tuesday in federal court.
Hawaii is seeking a nationwide order against the ban that removes Sudan from the list of affected countries and adds Chad and and North Korea, along with several officials from the government of Venezuela.
The addition of non-Muslim countries is “almost entirely symbolic,” the court documents state, noting that North Korea is already subject to extensive restrictions.
As Kerry Eleveld wrote, the Supreme Court had hearings scheduled over portions of the second ban that were allowed to take effect, but those were cancelled when Trump introduced 3.0. Now the Supreme Court has asked both parties in the case to weigh in on whether the case should be thrown out. ”The government argued that it should be but the ACLU argued that it shouldn’t be on grounds that 2.0 and 3.0 are substantively flawed in the same way.”