A new travel ban is coming. Will it hold up in court?
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On Monday, a new travel ban goes into effect, barring people in a dozen countries from entering the U.S. Travelers from an additional seven countries will face restrictions. We will not allow people to enter our country who wish to do us harm, and nothing will stop us from keeping America safe. President Trump announcing the ban earlier this week in a video message on social media.

This fulfills something he has long promised to bring back the travel ban he enacted during his first term just seven days after being sworn in. I'm establishing new vetting measures to keep radical Islamic terrorists away.

That's the president speaking from the White House on January 27, 2017. Within 24 hours, protests erupted at airports around the country as the administration's temporary ban, often referred to as the Muslim ban, went into effect. No hate, no fear. Refugees are welcome here. No hate, no fear.

Then the legal challenges began. There's been a court ruling regarding the president's revised travel ban. The court allowed full enforcement of the president's travel ban. The appeals court has ruled against reinstating the president's travel ban. The Justice Department filed court papers today to salvage the Trump administration's latest travel ban. For more than a year, the court challenges piled up. The administration revised its travel ban, revised it again,

And in June of 2018, the Supreme Court ultimately upheld the latest version, delivering a major victory to President Trump. Consider this. President Trump's travel ban is back and more expansive than before. Will it hold up in court? From NPR, I'm Mary Louise Kelly.

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It's Consider This from NPR. President Trump's travel ban takes effect on Monday. It's a revival of sorts of the ban from his first term. That travel ban was the subject of all kinds of legal challenges. Some legal scholars say President Trump has learned a lot since then, among them Stephen Vladek.

He's a law professor at Georgetown University and has paid close attention to Trump's legal moves over the years. Welcome. Thanks for having me. Your initial reaction to this new proclamation. I'm curious if there's anything in particular that sticks out.

Yeah.

before they found one that the Supreme Court would uphold. Really does seem like this version is based on some of the lessons learned from that. It doesn't single out Muslim majority countries. It tries to at least offer some kind of factual basis for why these countries and not others

I think there will still be plenty of litigation challenging this, but it's not at least as obviously and facially vulnerable to litigation as we saw back in 2017. Right. I'm thinking of the original travel ban, which everyone referred to as the so-called Muslim ban. And that's something that looks quite different this time in terms of the countries that are included. I will note that in the video that he dropped last night announcing this, he cited the

The attack this past Sunday in Boulder, saying that that attack underscored the dangers posed to the U.S. by foreign nationals. The man charged with that attack is from Egypt, which is not among the countries listed in this new ban.

Yeah, I mean, as is always the case with President Trump, there is a fair amount of daylight between what he says publicly and the actual policies to which he affixes his signature. But, you know, I think the problem here for those who think that's a legal defect and not just an optical one is, you know, the U.S. Supreme Court back in 2018 when it upheld the third iteration of the first Trump administration's travel ban said,

really did say that the president's actual motive is not that relevant to whether the underlying policy is lawful, that the president's entitled to fairly broad deference when it comes to these kinds of immigration decisions about who's allowed to enter the United States in the first place. And that's why it's important, although perhaps not ultimately sufficient,

that this new travel ban carves out folks who have green cards, carves out folks who already have approved visas of various sorts, because those were some of the real stumbling blocks last time around that really led the courts to stop the policy before it could get off the ground. I think this time around, the litigation is probably going to focus far more specifically on the particular factual grounds

that the government has come up with for why, for example, Laos is on the list but Egypt is not, whether the sort of the visa overstay data that the president purported to rely upon in his proclamation is actually both accurate and a legitimate basis. I think that, Mary Louise, is where we're going to see a lot of the action. So we're talking around this a little bit, but I'll just ask directly the central question about how strong the legal underpinning for this latest ban is. It

In your view, will it stand up in court? So I think the distinction that we should draw here is I do think on its face, this version is stronger than certainly the first two rounds we saw in the first Trump administration. It's probably on par with the third one, which is the one that the Supreme Court back in 2018 upheld.

This Supreme Court that we have in 2025 is not going to be any more skeptical of this kind of policy than the one we had seven years ago. But, Mary Louise, as is so often the case, a lot of the devil will be in the details. And I would not put it past this administration to implement this policy in a ham-handed, clumsy, if not even affirmatively malicious way.

that opens it up to other kinds of, you know, what the lawyers would call as applied legal challenges. So you're saying that there is what is actually written in the ban, the words, and then there's how it is enforced, how it is applied. That's exactly the distinction. And so it's, you know, my own view is that I think the words of this policy are probably going to do relatively well in court, but, you know, I would not put it past this administration to enforce it in a way that invites further lawsuits. Okay.

Last thing, when you say we should expect legal challenges, from what corner? Where will you be keeping an eye on?

So I think we're going to see efforts from folks maybe who are already in the United States but whose continuing ability to stay here is called into question by the travel ban, perhaps try to bring a lawsuit. Maybe folks who have a particular type of visa that's not one of the visa categories that is exempted from the travel ban. Maybe from refugee groups or other human rights-driven immigration-focused groups that

for whom this is a real problem for folks who might not yet have a visa but might have very strong legal arguments for why they should be allowed to come to the United States. That's really where we saw the plaintiffs emerge back in the first Trump administration and the challenges to the first, second, and third travel bans. If we're going to call this the fourth Trump travel ban, I suspect we're going to see similar plaintiffs perhaps from different countries this time around.

Stephen Vladek is a law professor at Georgetown University. Thanks so much. Thank you. This episode was produced by Catherine Fink with audio engineering by Ted Meebane. It was edited by Tenbeat Hermius. Our executive producer is Sammy Yenigan. It's Consider This from NPR. I'm Mary Louise Kelly.

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