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REUTERS
SAN FRANCISCO
PRESIDENT Donald Trump's travel ban on citizens of six Muslim-majority nations faces its second challenge at a US appeals court next month, and this time more Republican states are backing the measure, while one Democratic state attorney general dropped out of the legal fight this week.
Some legal experts say the states'realignment could signal that the changes made last month to Trump's original executive order have strengthened the government's case.
Sixteen Democratic state attorneys general and the District of Colombia on Thursday filed a"friend of the court"brief backing Hawaii in its bid to block the March 6 executive order, which two federal judges put on hold before it could be implemented. Hawaii and other states argue the ban violates the U.S. Constitution because it discriminates against Muslims.
But Pennsylvania Attorney General Josh Shapiro, who opposed the original ban that Trump signed on Jan. 27, did not join Thursday's brief, which was filed in the 9th US Circuit Court of Appeals. Shapiro declined to comment.
On the other side, Texas, which had been alone in its support for the original January order, has gained the support of 14 Republican states urging that the ban go forward in a legal brief filed on April 10. Those states back the government's argument that the president has wide authority to implement immigration policy and that the ban is needed to prevent terrorist attacks.
Trump's original ban, which the president said was needed for national security to head off attacks by Islamist militants, applied to seven Muslim-majority nations and indefinitely banned the entry of all refugees from Syria. It was revised and narrowed after a flurry of legal challenges.
"The second executive order was much more carefully written than the first. Maybe when various states analyzed it they weren't as interested as joining,"said Stephen Yale-Loehr an immigration expert at Cornell University Law School.
