Just because the U.S. President showed religious animus toward a religious minority, he still has broad authority to impose travel restrictions the Supreme Court ruled in its recent travel ban decision. The 5-4 decision overturned several lower courts to rule that President Trump’s refined ban of September 2017 on travelers from several predominantly Muslim countries passed the scrutiny of the Court.
While the court did not follow the logic of the earlier Masterpiece Cakeshop decision, which was decided on the basis of animus, “the Court largely deferred to a broad-based Presidential power to restrict immigration and travel so long as he could demonstrate that the entry of the people affected ‘would be detrimental to the interests of the United States.’ In this case, the administration could not be confident that these travelers would not pose a security risk.
Once the Supreme Court prioritized security over animus so long as the ban was “neutral on its face,” the Court would then look at the language of the ban itself to determine whether it was “plausibly related to the Government’s stated objective to protect the country and improve vetting processes.” The majority said the President was “largely immune from judicial control” in this case, which upholds his broad powers.
The majority found that Korematsu v. United States (1944) in which the Supreme Court upheld a President’s right to the relocation of American citizens of Japanese descent into internment camps was not analogous to this case, but pointed out that Korematsu had been “gravely wrong the day it was decided.” The dissent said of this statement, “the Court takes the important step of finally overruling Korematsu.”
Justice Sotomayor dissented. By “accepting the Government’s misguided invitation to sanction a discriminatory policy motivated by animosity toward a disfavored group, all in the name of a superficial claim of national security, the Court redeploys the same dangerous logic underlying Korematsu and merely replaces one ‘gravely wrong’ decision with another.”
She also noted that the Court applied an inconsistent standard to the Colorado Civil Rights Commission in Masterpiece Cakeshop, which the Court found to have acted without “the neutrality that the Free Exercise Clause requires” and the travel ban case where the Trump administration “will not be held accountable for breaching the First Amendment’s guarantee of religious neutrality and tolerance.”
Sotomayor wrote, the majority, “completely sets aside the President’s charged statements about Muslims as irrelevant. That holding erodes the foundational principles of religious tolerance that the Court elsewhere has so emphatically protected, and it tells members of minority religions in our country ‘that they are outsiders, not full members of the political community.'”
Though the court noted that U.S. citizens would have a constitutional protection concerning entry to the U.S., foreign nationals do not that right.
Commercial travel in the last days will become almost impossible, particularly for those who are a demonized religious minority. While the President’s ban currently applies to foreign nationals, the day will likely come when the security issue will be applied to citizens as well. This SCOTUS decision is setting the stage for further restrictions on religious minorities perceived as harmful.
“We have no time to lose. The end is near. The passage from place to place to spread the truth will soon be hedged with dangers on the right hand and on the left. Everything will be placed to obstruct the way of the Lord’s messengers, so that they will not be able to do that which it is possible for them to do now.” Testimonies for the Church, Vol. 6, page 22.
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