WASHINGTON (Diya TV) — A federal judge in Hawaii issued a nationwide order Wednesday evening blocking President Trump’s travel ban from parts of the Muslim world, a stinging blow to the White House and a sign the president will have to account in court about his heated rhetoric about Islam.
Overnight, a second federal judge from Maryland also ruled against Trump, with a separate order forbidding the core provision of the travel ban from going into effect.
The rulings equaled a second major setback for President Trump in pursuit of his national security agenda. His first attempt to limit travel from a handful of predominantly Muslim countries ended in a courtroom fiasco last month, when a federal court in Seattle halted it. Trump issued a new and much narrower travel ban, affect six countries, on March 6 in an attempt to satisfy the courts by removing some of the most contentious elements of the original version.
Judge Derrick K. Watson, of Federal District Court in Honolulu, wrote that a “reasonable, objective observer” would view even the new order as “issued with a purpose to disfavor a particular religion, in spite of its stated, religiously neutral purpose.”
In Maryland, Judge Theodore D. Chuang echoed a similar sentiment just hours later, ruling in a case brought by nonprofit groups that work with refugees and immigrants, that the likely purpose of the executive order was “the effectuation of the proposed Muslim ban” Trump had promised when he was on the campaign trail.
Trump lashed out at Judge Watson during a campaign-style rally in Nashville late on Wednesday.He accused the judge of ruling “for political reasons” and criticized the United States Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit, which upheld the earlier decision against his administration and will hear any appeal to the Hawaii ruling.
“This ruling makes us look weak, which by the way we no longer are, believe me,” Trump told the crowd.
Judge Watson, who was appointed by President Barack Obama, ruled that the State of Hawaii and an individual plaintiff, Ismail Elshikh, the imam of the Muslim Association of Hawaii, had reasonable grounds to challenge the order as religious discrimination. And he concluded that allowing the travel restrictions to go into effect at midnight, as scheduled, could have caused them irreparable harm.
Watson rejected the government’s argument that a court would have to investigate Trump’s “veiled psyche” to deduce religious animus.
In the Maryland case, Judge Chuang, who was also appointed by Obama, declined to block the entire executive order from going into effect, but ruled that the most important section — banning travel from half a dozen countries — could not be enforced.