US Supreme Court allows travel ban against six Muslim states

The US Supreme Court on Monday handed a victory to President Donald Trump by allowing his latest travel ban targeting people from six Muslim-majority countries to go into full effect even as legal challenges continue in lower courts.

The court, with two of the nine justices dissenting, granted his administration’s request to lift two injunctions imposed by lower courts that had partially blocked the ban, which is the third version of a contentious policy that Mr Trump first sought to implement a week after taking office in January.

The action suggests the High Court could uphold the latest version of the ban that Mr Trump announced in September.

The ban applies to travellers from Chad, Iran, Libya, Somalia, Syria and Yemen.

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Lower courts had said people from those nations with a claim of a “bona fide” relationship with someone in the US could not be kept out of the country.

Grandparents, cousins and other relatives were among those the courts said could not be excluded.

Justices Ruth Bader Ginsburg and Sonia Sotomayor would have left the lower court orders in place.

The San Francisco-based 9th US Circuit Court of Appeals and the 4th US Circuit Court of Appeals in Richmond, Virginia, will be holding arguments on the legality of the ban this week.

Both courts are dealing with the issue on an accelerated basis, and the Supreme Court noted it expected those courts to reach decisions “with appropriate dispatch”.

Quick resolution by appellate courts would allow the Supreme Court to hear and decide the issue this term, by the end of June. – Press Association