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Fresh challenges to President Trump’s court-frozen immigration order took shape Monday with two former secretaries of state claiming the White House was undermining national security and nearly 100 Silicon Valley tech companies arguing it will keep the best minds from coming to America.
The powerful new voices were added with another legal showdown coming as early as Monday. The suspension of the order, meanwhile, has allowed those previously banned more time to try to reach the United States.
. . . A decision Sunday by the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 9th Circuit preserved a lower judge’s order to temporarily halt the ban — and based on a schedule the court outlined, the stop will remain in place at least until sometime on Monday. The Justice Department said it would not elevate the dispute to the Supreme Court before that.
. . . Hours earlier, a host of technology giants — including Apple, Facebook, Google, Microsoft, Netflix, Twitter, Uber — were part of a “friend of the court” legal brief by 97 companies opposing the Trump administration’s immigration order.
The brief claimed the order was a “significant departure” from U.S. immigration policies and “makes it more difficult and expensive for U.S. companies to recruit, hire, and retain some of the world’s best employees.
. . . Vice President Pence said Sunday on NBC’s “Meet The Press” that White House officials felt that Trump was “operating within his authority as president, both under the Constitution and under clear statutory law.” Legal analysts have said the president has broad authority to set immigration policy, although civil liberties advocates have countered that the order essentially amounts to a discriminatory ban on Muslims that has no real national security purpose.
“We’re very confident that we’re going to prevail,” Pence said. “We’ll accomplish the stay and will win the case on the merits. But again, the focus here is on the safety and security of the American people.”
