Legal Battle Over Trump Ban Could Be Headed To US Supreme Court

Legal briefs were pouring into a federal appellate court in San Francisco Monday morning, as President Donald Trump’s order barring refugees and people from seven Muslim-majority countries from entering the United States moves into the next phase of a contentious court battle.

Two U.S. states, 10 former senior U.S. diplomats and security officials, and close to 100 big tech companies have filed briefs with the Ninth U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals opposing the travel ban, which they say is discriminatory, counterproductive, and “a significant departure from the principles of fairness and predictability that have governed the immigration system.” 

The government has until 3pm PST on Monday to submit its own briefs to the appeals court justifying the executive order. “Following that,” Reuters reports, “the court is expected to act quickly, and a decision either way may ultimately result in the case reaching the U.S. Supreme Court.”

Speaking on Fox News Sunday, Sen. Dianne Feinstein, the top Democrat on the Judiciary Committee, said she had “no doubt that it will go to the Supreme Court, and probably some judgments will be made whether this president has exceed[ed] his authority or not.”

In their filing (pdf), Washington state and Minnesota said that reinstating Trump’s ban—temporarily halted in its entirety by a judge on Friday—would “unleash chaos again.”

The Associated Press reports:

The brief (pdf) from the high-ranking security officials, who include two former secretaries of state, two former heads of the CIA, a former secretary of Defense, a former secretary of Homeland Security, and senior officials of the National Security Council, blasted the order as “ill-conceived, poorly implemented, and ill-explained.”

“This order cannot be justified on national security or foreign policy grounds,” the co-authors—John Kerry, Madeleine Albright, Janet Napolitano, Susan Rice, Leon Panetta, John McLaughlin, Avril Haines, Michael Hayden, Lisa Monaco, and Michael Morell—wrote in the filing. “It does not perform its declared task of ‘protecting the nation from foreign terrorist entry into the United States.'”

In fact, they wrote that the order could endanger U.S. troops abroad and “aid [the Islamic State’s, or ISIS’s] propaganda effort and serve its recruitment message by feeding into the narrative that the United States is at war with Islam.”