An immigration group is defending President Donald Trump’s travel ban, which would have temporarily halted the flow of foreign refugees being resettled in the U.S.
The Immigration Reform Law Institute (IRLI) filed a brief in appellate court for a federal lawsuit against Trump’s executive order which originally intended to halt refugee resettlement from terror-prone nations, according to a news release.
The group says that the ruling against Trump’s order “defied a large body of Supreme Court precedents establishing that, in First Amendment challenges, courts should give no more than limited scrutiny to presidential directives in the area of war, foreign relations, and the admission of aliens.”
The brief highlights that the challenge by the district court in Hawaii had no more authority to halt Trump’s ban than it does to stop the President from eradicating the Islamic State, as he promised he would on the campaign trail last year.
“If calling for a temporary pause in Muslim entry reveals impermissible animus, surely announcing a war of extermination on a particular religious body does so even more,” the brief notes. “Yet no one believes that a federal district court has the power to enjoin our nation’s military campaign against the Islamic State.”
In March, Trump’s travel ban was shot down by a Hawaii judge after “the U.S.-citizen plaintiff, a Muslim, had standing because he claimed to be ‘deeply saddened…. by the message [the Order] conveys – that a broad travel ban is ‘needed’ to prevent people from certain Muslim countries from entering the United States,’ and because he believed that the Order would harm the ability of members of his mosque to associate freely with those of other faiths,” the brief states.
The Hawaii judge’s ruling also relied on statements made by Trump when he was running for office, rather than the language of the order.
IRLI’s Executive Director Dale Wilcox said in a statement that the Trump Administration is not the first to issue restrictions on immigration, which the U.S. Constitution gives broad power to.
“In our constitutional system, Congress has been delegated plenary power over immigration,” Wilcox said. “It has enacted many statutes over decades that restrict alien-entry based on nationality, religion, and ideology.”
“Through those statutes, Congress has given the President broad authority to control the entry of aliens into the U.S. who he deems detrimental to our interests,” Wilcox continued. “The EO was clearly designed to protect national security and does not run afoul of the Establishment Clause. The Ninth Circuit should dissolve the injunction.”
As Breitbart News reported last year, some 380 foreign-born terrorists have been convicted of terrorism in the U.S. since the September 11, 2001 Islamic terrorist attacks.
John Binder is a reporter for Breitbart Texas. Follow him on Twitter at @JxhnBinder.
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