President Donald Trump finally has his travel ban.
On Tuesday, the Supreme Court ruled in favor of the most recent version of the travel ban in Trump v. Hawaii. This isn’t the same executive order that generated a huge backlash in the early days of Trump’s presidency. That order banned all people from seven majority-Muslim countries for 90 days and nearly all refugees for 120 days — and was struck down by the courts.
This latest executive order, the administration’s third try at a travel ban, doesn’t just apply to majority-Muslim countries, but also North Korea and Venezuela.
So how did Trump finally get his travel ban? This chart shows the three executive orders and the times lower courts struck them down, all leading up to Tuesday’s Supreme Court ruling that allows the most recent ban to continue.
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Of course, what’s not shown in this flowchart is Trump’s campaign proposal to stop all Muslims from coming to the US — a point that opponents of the ban argued revealed the fundamentally anti-Muslim (and hence unconstitutional) nature of the ban.
Justice Sonia Sotomayor pointed out this line of events in her dissent: “It leaves undisturbed a policy first advertised openly and unequivocally as a ‘total and complete shutdown of Muslims entering the United States’ because the policy now masquerades behind a façade of national-security concerns.”
To be clear, Tuesday’s ruling doesn’t explicitly rule on the merits of the ban. It sends it back for the 9th Circuit Court to reconsider — but the Supreme Court’s decision makes it difficult for courts to strike down the ban.
