If the U.S. Supreme Court take it up, the justices would be called upon to decide whether courts should always defer to the president over allowing certain people to enter the country, especially when national security is the stated reason for an action, as in this case.
The administration also wants to be able to suspend the refugee program for 120 days, a separate aspect of the policy that has been blocked by a federal judge in Hawaii and is now being considered by the 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals.
President Donald Trump clearly got a taste for shaking things up yesterday, as he turned to the Supreme Court to reinstate his ill-fated travel ban just hours after withdrawing the USA from a historic climate change agreement.
On Thursday, the US Justice Department filed with the Supreme Court to immediately reinstate the executive order Signed by President Trump that attempted to create a temporary travel ban on six Muslim majority nations.
Department spokeswoman Sarah Isgur Flores said the government will be arguing the ban is lawful.
The Virginia-based federal appeals court voted 10-3 to uphold the nationwide halt to the policy on appeal from a circuit court judge, saying the travel ban was driven by unconstitutional religious motivations.
However, a district court in Maryland found the ban violated constitutional rights and blocked it before it could take effect on 16 March. If the government's request is granted the ban would go into effect. In blocking Trump's travel ban, the appeals court pointed to that language and said the administration acted in "bad faith".
Several judges and a panel of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 9th Circuit shut it down.
'Qatar must do more to combat extremism,' says Tillerson
Qatar's Al Udeid Air Base is home to more than 11,000 USA and coalition forces and an important base for the fight against IS. The states accused Qatar of supporting terrorist groups, as well as of interfering in other countries' domestic affairs.
"From the highest elected office in the nation has come an executive order steeped in animus and directed at a single religious group", Gregory said in the 79-page opinion, which was accompanied by concurrences and dissents from his colleagues.
This is actually the administration's second controversial attempt to impose a temporary travel ban on citizens from seven majority Muslim countries - Libya, Syria, Somalia, Sudan, Yemen, Iran and Iraq.
Our first step will be to ask the Supreme Court to refuse to stay the Fourth Circuit's decision, which was supported by a large majority of the judges on the full court and is consistent with rulings from other courts across the nation.
The Trump administration would need the votes of five of the nine Supreme Court justices to temporarily stay the lower court injunctions.
The Department of Justice filed an emergency petition at the Supreme Court late Thursday, asking the justices to allow enforcement of the president's executive order and overturn a lower court ruling barring the directive's imposition.
At the time, Attorney General Jeff Sessions vowed that the case would be appealed to the Supreme Court because it "blocks the president's efforts to strengthen this country's national security".
The court in Richmond said it "remained unconvinced" that the naming of specific countries had "more to do with national security than it does with effectuating the president's promised Muslim ban". The revised ban was the same, but removed Iraq from this list.
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