Hawai‘i Attorney General Comments on Trump Travel Ban Ruling

President Donald Trump’s official portrait from Wikimedia Commons.

The Fourth Circuit Court of Appeals upheld a nationwide injunction against President Donald Trump’s Revised Executive Order dated March 6, 2017, banning travel from six Muslim-majority nations.

Today’s Fourth Circuit ruling noted that the text of the revised Executive Order “speaks with vague words of national security, but in context, drips with religious intolerance, animus and discrimination.”

“Terrorism must be stopped, but not by sacrificing our constitutional principles or denigrating entire classes of people,” said Attorney General Douglas Chin on Thursday, May 25. “Not even the president of the United States is above the U.S. Constitution.”

On May 15, 2017, the State of Hawai‘i argued in the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals in support of Hawai‘i federal district court Judge Derrick K. Watson’s order enjoining President Trump’s Executive Order nationwide on grounds that the Executive Order violated the Establishment Clause of the First Amendment. The Ninth Circuit’s decision in that case, Hawaii v. Trump, is still pending.