Trump, Defeated Again on the Travel Ban, Is Still Trapped in His Campaign

President Trump’s first travel ban was worded vaguely and took effect suddenly, and so the legal responses to it—the public-interest attorneys hurrying to airports, and huddling with family members and laptops in food courts—were a remarkable improvisation. The second ban, against which a federal judge in Hawaii issued a temporary restraining order, on Wednesday night, was announced in advance, and the Administration’s opponents were prepared. The Hawaii case was argued by Neal Katyal, perhaps the most famed progressive litigator of his generation, who was both a principal Deputy Solicitor General under President Obama and the lead attorney in the Hamdan v. Rumsfeld case, which dismantled the military commissions that had governed Guantánamo Bay. The plaintiff was handpicked, too: Ismail Elshikh, the imam of the Muslim Association of Hawaii, whose Syrian mother-in-law was subject to the ban. Elshikh wrote in his pleading that his children are “deeply affected by the knowledge that the United States—their own country—would discriminate against individuals who are of the same ethnicity as them, including members of their own family.” In the precision of this testimony, you could sense that the rushed and panicked responders to the first ban had developed a structure, and refined their arguments.

See the rest of the story at newyorker.com

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