US: Trump travel ban dealt new legal defeat

By Michael Hernandez

WASHINGTON (AA) - U.S. President Donald Trump's executive order temporarily curtailing immigration from six Muslim-majority countries was dealt a new legal blow on Monday when the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals upheld an injunction blocking its implementation.

"We conclude that the President, in issuing the Executive Order, exceeded the scope of the authority delegated to him by Congress," the three-judge panel wrote in its decision.

"Immigration, even for the President, is not a one-person show," they added.

Critically, the judges again pointed to Trump's social media presence to substantiate their ruling, including a seres of Twitter posts from June 5 in which the president claimed "we need a TRAVEL BAN for certain DANGEROUS countries, not some politically correct term that won’t help us protect our people!"

The judges ruled that in so writing, Trump made public his determination that the countries, rather than their citizens, "are inherently dangerous".

They further acknowledged the White House's confirmation that Trump's tweets are official presidential statements.

The Trump administration had previously requested that Supreme Court take up the case following mounting lower court defeats.

In January, Trump signed an executive order blocking the entry of people from Iraq, Somalia, Iran, Syria, Sudan, Libya and Yemen. However, this was defeated by legal challenges in the states of Washington and Minnesota.

An altered order -- dropping Iraq and proposing a 90-day suspension of visas for people from the other six countries, as well as a 120-day hiatus on the admission of refugees -- was blocked by a court in Maryland.

A federal judge in Hawaii also sided with the ban's opponents.

On May 25, a federal appeals court in Virginia refused to lift the temporary block, saying Trump’s order “drips with religious intolerance, animus and discrimination”.