Federal judge in Hawaii blocks Trump’s 3rd travel ban hours before it was going to take effect

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A federal judge in Hawaii on Tuesday granted a temporary restraining order against President Donald Trump’s third travel ban, just hours before it was set to take effect at midnight on October 18.

Trump issued a proclamation last month restricting travel to the US from nationals of eight countries, including Iran, Syria, Yemen, Somalia, Venezuela, Chad, Libya, and North Korea.

Those restrictions came after the first two iterations of the travel ban, which targeted majority-Muslim nations, faced court challenges.

Trump’s second travel ban had been partly implemented and its constitutionality was set to be argued before the Supreme Court in October. But the justices dismissed one of its challenges and removed oral arguments from the schedule after part of the second ban expired and Trump issued the third ban in replacement.

US District Court Judge Derrick Watson said in a 40-page opinion on Wednesday that Trump’s third travel ban would cause "irreparable harm" and violate federal immigration law were it to take effect.

"[The travel ban] suffers from precisely the same maladies as its predecessor: it lacks sufficient findings that the entry of more than 150 million nationals from six specified countries would be ‘detrimental to the interests of the United States,’" Watson wrote, adding that the ban "plainly discriminates based on nationality."

Trump’s newest proclamation, issued on September 24, replaced the outright ban with travel restrictions tailored on a country-by-country basis, depending on whether or not they met certain US standards.

Unlike the previous travel bans, the third version did away with the original 90-day suspension on admitting travelers from the named countries. Instead, the new ban would have issued permanent travel restrictions that could be expanded or retracted based on the countries’ compliance with US standards.

Watson also said Trump’s proclamation contained "internal incoherencies that markedly undermine its stated ‘national security’ rationale," because many other countries that were not named in the ban also fail to meet one or more of the US’s standards.

For instance, Watson noted, Iraq is excluded from the ban purportedly because of diplomatic ties to the US and its "commitment" to fighting ISIS, but fails Trump’s "baseline" security assessment.

"Under the law of this Circuit, these provisions do not afford the President unbridled discretion to do as he pleases," Watson said, calling the proclamation "simultaneously overbroad and underinclusive."

Watson noted in his opinion that the plaintiffs argued that Trump "never renounced or repudiated his calls for a ban on Muslim immigration." The plaintiffs argued that Trump’s calls for a full-throated ban have only grown more steady as time went on, Watson noted.

Watson’s opinion even cited several of Trump’s tweets from early June, in which Trump railed against the legal challenges to his initial travel ban, complaining that the Department of Justice had created a "watered down, politically correct version" in an effort to appease the Supreme Court.

"People, the lawyers and the courts can call it whatever they want, but I am calling it what we need and what it is, a TRAVEL BAN!" Trump wrote in another tweet, which was also cited in Watson’s opinion.

On Tuesday, Neal Katyal, one of the lawyers representing the plaintiffs, celebrated Watson’s ruling. "We have just won," Katyal tweeted.

Read the full order below:

This is a developing story. Refresh for updates.

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