The ruling upholding US travel ban is controversial

US President Donald Trump (Photo: AFP/File

Initially, Libya, Iran, Syria, Yemen, Venezuela, North Korea, Iraq and Chad were named in the travel ban; Chad and Sudan were later removed.

President Donald Trump has little reason to rejoice over the slim majority (5-4) by which the US Supreme Court upheld his travel ban on several Muslim countries, for all nine judges recalled in detail his hate speeches against Muslims and put them on permanent judicial record for all time to come.

They also recalled the court’s own shameful decision in 1944, to uphold Roosevelt’s order to force Japanese Americans into internment camps during the Second World War, in the infamous Korematsu vs United States. The majority purported formally to overrule it now. But, as Justice Sotomayor said in her strong dissent, “This formal repudiation of a shameful precedent is laudable and long overdue. But it does not make the majority’s decision here acceptable or right. By blindly accepting the government’s misguided invitation to sanction a discriminatory policy motivated by animosity towards a disfavoured group, all in the name of a superficial claim of national security, the court redeploys the same dangerous logic underlying Korematsu and merely replaces one ‘gravely wrong’ decision with another.”

Initially, Libya, Iran, Syria, Yemen, Venezuela, North Korea, Iraq and Chad were named in the travel ban; Chad and Sudan were later removed. The state of Hawaii, three individuals with foreign relatives affected by the ban, and the Muslim Association of Hawaii challenged Trump’s proclamation except with regard to North Korea and Venezuela.

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