Tag: immigration

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Law

Most Americans do not support Trump’s stance on immigration

President Trump is losing his battle over immigration in the courts of law and in the court of public opinion.

Six-in-ten Americans say immigrants strengthen the country because of their hard work and talents, compared with 27% who say immigrants are a burden because they take jobs, housing and health care, a survey published in December by the Pew Research Center shows.

The share of Americans who regard immigrants as more of a strength than a burden reached its highest level in more than 20 years, the survey found.

Support for immigrants among Americans runs counter to policies pursued by the president, who wants to build a wall along the southern border, round up and deport people who are in the country without documentation, and ban travel to the U.S. from six predominantly Muslim countries. A series of federal courts have blocked the White House from enforcing the ban after concluding that it disfavors Islam in violation of the the First Amendment.

Still, attitudes toward immigration differ along party lines, which may explain why Trump returns repeatedly to the topic. Though 82% of Democrats think immigrants strengthen the country (13% say they’re a burden), 44% of Republicans say immigrants are a burden, compared with 39% of Republicans who say immigrants strengthen the country, Pew found.

Immigration also divides the GOP along demographic lines. More than half (51%) of Republicans with a college education say immigrants strengthen the country, compared with 34% who say they’re a burden. In the 2016 election, two-thirds (67%) of white voters without a college degree backed Trump, compared with 28% who supported Hillary Clinton – the largest margin among whites without a college degree in exit polls since 1980.

Among Democrats, wide majorities of all groups within the party say immigrants strengthen the country.

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Law

The Fourth Circuit’s ruling against the Trump travel ban shows that campaigns also have consequences

President Trump’s halt to visits to the United States by people from six majority-Muslim countries excludes people from the United States based on their religious beliefs in violation of the First Amendment, the Fourth Circuit ruled  on Thursday in yet another rebuke to the White House over the constitutionality of its travel ban.

The executive order that enshrines the ban “speaks with vague words of national security, but in context drips with religious intolerance, animus, and discrimination,” Chief Judge Roger Gregory wrote on behalf of 10 of his colleagues at the outset of a 67-page opinion published Thursday by the court’s majority.

The ruling means that an order by a district judge in Maryland that blocks implementation of the ban nationwide will remain in effect pending a determination by the Supreme Court, to which the administration said it would appeal. A ruling by the Ninth Circuit, which also is weighing the travel ban’s constitutionality, is expected shortly.

Words matter

In support of its conclusion that the travel ban disfavors Islam, the court relied on a series of statements that the president and his surrogates uttered before and after the election. They range from a statement in December 2015 by Trump that called for “a total and complete shutdown of Muslims entering the United States,” to statements by the president in January that his order aimed to promote Christianity, to comments in February by White House adviser Stephen Miller that the revised order reflects “the same basic policy outcome for the country” as the order it replaced.

Those statements, together with “the post hoc nature of the national security rationale” and evidence from national security agencies that a revised version of the travel ban signed in March by Trump would have no effect on national security persuaded the court that the administration’s leaning on national security “was provided in bad faith, as a pretext for [the order’s] religious purpose,” Gregory wrote.

Despite the urging of the government, the majority refused to disregard statements by Trump solely because he uttered them as a candidate. “The campaign statements here are probative of purpose because they are closely related in time, attributable to the primary decisionmaker, and specific and easily connected to the challenged action,” said Gregory, who declined to adopt “a bright-line rule against considering campaign statements” and said the court would continue to review such statements case-by-case.

The challengers “have seriously called into question whether the stated reason for” the travel ban was provided in good faith, noted the majority, citing a concurrence by Justice Kennedy in a ruling two years ago by the Supreme Court that suggests courts should look in such instances behind the reasons the government gives to support its actions.

In dissent, Judge Paul Niemeyer rejected the majority’s reliance on campaign statements, which are “often short-hand for larger ideas; they are explained, modified, retracted, and amplified as they are repeated and as new circumstances and arguments arise,” wrote Niemeyer. “The Supreme Court surely will shudder at the majority’s adoption of this new rule that has no limits or bounds — one that transforms the majority’s criticisms of a candidate’s various campaign statements into a constitutional violation.”

We may be about to find out.

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Law

Why the Supreme Court will block Trump’s travel ban

Two-and-a-half years ago, in the aftermath of the Paris attacks, Congress, with the support of the Obama administration, tightened scrutiny of foreigners entering the United States who had visited Syria, Iran, Sudan or Iraq during the past five years. In February 2016, the Obama administration extended the scrutiny to visitors from Libya, Somalia and Yemen.

Fast forward to March, when President Trump issued an executive order that banned, for a period of three months, visits to the U.S. from nationals of three of those four countries (Iraq excluded) along with Libya, Somalia and Yemen.

In support of its decision, the White House cited reports published in June 2016 by the State Department that cataloged conditions in each country that cause their residents, as the administration asserts, to present a risk to the security of the U.S. The administration cited no evidence in the nine months that ensued (or since) to reinforce its conclusion that national security demands a halt to visits to the U.S. from residents of those six predominantly Muslim countries. (A travel ban would not have prevented an attack like the one Monday in Manchester, which was carried out by a citizen.)

The evidence cited by the White House to bolster its claims feels warmed over. That explains, in part, why the State of Hawaii and others suing to invalidate the ban accuse the president of leaning on national security as a pretext to disfavor Islam, in violation of the First Amendment’s Establishment Clause. A series of federal district judges, along with three judges of the 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals court, have agreed with the challengers, who have adduced a series of statements by Trump and his surrogates that suggest an intent to enact a Muslim ban.

The appeal came before the Fourth and Ninth (again) circuits last week. Regardless how they rule, one of the parties will look for relief to the Supreme Court. Yet notwithstanding what will be a push by at least four justices –Roberts, Thomas, Alito and Gorsuch – to side with the president, the administration will struggle to secure a majority for its position. (More on Justice Kennedy in a moment.)

During arguments last Monday before the Ninth Circuit, Jeffrey Wall, the acting U.S. solicitor general, contended that the Supreme Court has authorized the president to restrict entry of foreigners into the U.S. and obligated judges to defer to that decision provided it is based on a “facially legitimate and bona fide reason.”

To say that Trump acted in bad faith with an intent to discriminate against Muslims, would require “the strongest showing for that sort of remarkable holding, and I just don’t think plaintiffs have put together the kind of record” that would support that conclusion, Wall argued.

Congress designated three of the six countries as sponsors of terrorism and removed visitors from those countries from the so-called visa waiver program, he noted. In short, Wall argued, the Trump travel ban reinforces a determination reached previously.

Therein lies the weakness of what Wall is defending. For all its talk of the need to bolster security, the White House has not assembled a record that could lead courts to defer to its judgement about the alleged threat posed by visitors from the banned countries. And that’s despite the law being largely on the president’s side.

You could see the judges of the Ninth Circuit struggling to find support in the record for the president’s determination about the threat that he contends the travel ban addresses. “How is a court to know if in fact it’s a Muslim ban in the guise of national security justification?” Judge Ronald Gould asked Wall. Is there sufficient evidence that admitting everyone from the six countries identified in the ban would threaten national security sufficient to justify the ban, Gould wanted to know.

Wall replied that the travel ban addresses concerns that Congress articulated after the attacks in Paris. But he offered nothing new to justify the ban, which Neil Katyal, who argued the case for the challengers, noted:

“We’re not here saying that the president doesn’t have emergency powers, national security powers. Of course, he does. The question is, when you have a circumstance like this, when the very evidence that they have pointed to was before the Congress of the United States, and they said, ‘We don’t need this mass, dragnet ban. Instead, we can do something more limited: require visas.’ That is particularly telling.”

Katyal argued that the executive order cites crimes committed by two people who entered the U.S. from Iraq, which is not subject to the travel ban. The order also mentions someone from Somalia, who came to the U.S. as a refugee when he was two years old and committed crimes when he was an adult, Katyal noted.

You start to see why a court might conclude that the White House has not reasoned its way through this one. Or that it really wants to ban Muslims.

Motive matters

Which brings us back to Justice Kennedy. Two years ago, the court ruled that a U.S. citizen cannot challenge the denial of a visa for her non-citizen spouse, an Afghan citizen and former civil servant who resided in Afghanistan. Not only did the government not infringe a constitutionally protected interest of the citizen when it denied the visa, but “to the extent that she received any explanation for the government’s decision, this was more than the Due Process Clause required,” Justice Scalia wrote for the majority.

While Justice Kennedy concurred that the citizen could not challenge the denial, he would not have gone as far as his colleagues. Once the government decides to deny a visa for a “facially legitimate and bona fide reason” (see above), courts will not “look behind” the reasons for the exercise of that discretion, particularly in the area of national security, Kennedy noted.

But in its decision to deny a visa to the non-citizen spouse, the government followed steps prescribed by law, Kennedy noted. So, he reasoned, the non-citizen spouse’s failure to satisfy a condition for admissibility (the spouse worked for the Taliban government), rendered the denial facially legitimate.

Thus, “absent an affirmative showing of bad faith on the part of the consular officer who denied [the non-citizen spouse] a visa,” (there was none) the court will not “look behind” the government’s decision “for additional factual details” that would explain its decision, Kennedy wrote.

The government can claim no such footing that would support the Trump travel ban, the plaintiffs argue. The ban does not turn on a decision by a consular officer to deny a visa, and, they assert, the president’s own statements suggest bad faith that compels the court to examine his motives. In short, motive matters when analyzing action by the government that disregards constitutional guarantees of religious freedom. “Official action that targets religious conduct for distinctive treatment cannot be shielded by mere compliance with the requirement of facial neutrality,” Justice Kennedy wrote for the majority in a 1993 case that involved religious gerrymandering.

The record is likely to lead at least five justices to look behind the justification that the White House has offered. When they do, they will struggle to find support that merits a ban that sweeps as broadly as Trump’s

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Law

Judge orders White House to turn over Giuliani ‘Muslim ban’ memo

In their rulings blocking President Trump’s travel ban from taking effect, at least two federal judges have cited statements by the president and his surrogates as evidence that the White House sought to prevent Muslims from visiting the U.S. in violation of the Constitution.

Among the statements is one by former New York City mayor Rudy Giuliani, who told Fox News in January that Trump had asked him to “put a commission together” to advise on a ban and to show the president “the right way to do it legally.”

Now District Judge Victoria Roberts in Detroit has ordered the White House to turn over to the Arab American Civil Rights League and others suing to invalidate the ban a memo from Giuliani and several Trump advisers, including strategist Stephen Bannon and Attorney General Jeff Sessions, before they were in their current posts, as well as Michael Flynn, the former national security director.

“We believe these documents will show exactly how the Muslim ban that Donald Trump called for on the campaign trail turned into the executive order he issued a week after taking office,” Miriam Aukerman, senior staff attorney at the American Civil Liberties Union of Michigan, said in a statement.

Giuliani says his comments to Fox have been misconstrued and that Trump had not asked him to formulate a ban on Muslims that could pass muster with the courts but instead asked “what can he do legally to keep the country safe.”

The commission sought to focus on “the areas of the world that create danger for us” and not religion, the former mayor said.

In a ruling in February that prevented the travel ban from taking effect, District Judge Leonie Brinkema noted that “the evidence in this record focuses on the president’s statements about a ‘Muslim ban’ and the link Giuliani established between those statements and the [executive order.]”

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Law

Unpacking the arguments over Trump’s ‘Muslim ban’

Arguments on Monday before the Fourth Circuit over the constitutionality of the Trump travel ban highlight a collision of legal theories.

Jeffery Wall, the acting United States solicitor general, urged the 13-judge panel to defer to the president on what the government terms a matter of immigration policy and national security. In support of his argument, Wall leaned heavily on a ruling by the Supreme Court 45 years ago in a case known as Kleindienst v. Mandel.

That case arose from accusations by a group of university professors that a decision by the attorney general to deny a visa to Dr. Ernest Mandel, a Belgian academic and self-described “revolutionary Marxist” who sought to deliver a series of lectures at Americans universities violated the professors’ – all U.S. citizens – First Amendment right to hear Mandel’s views.

The court rejected their argument. Writing for the majority, Justice Blackmun noted that Congress had delegated to the president the power to make policies and rules for the exclusion of aliens. When the president exercises that power “on the basis of a facially legitimate and bona fide reason, the courts will neither look behind the exercise of that discretion nor test it by balancing its justification against the First Amendment interests of those who seek personal communication with the applicant,” he wrote.

In dissent, Justice Marshall expressed concern that the court would not examine the reason the White House gives for excluding someone, especially when a group of Americans accused the government of violating the First Amendment.

“Even the briefest peek behind the Attorney General’s reason for refusing a waiver in this case would reveal that it is a sham,” Marshall wrote. “At least when the rights of Americans are involved, there is no basis for concluding that the power to exclude aliens is absolute.”

Mandel became law. “The court said no… we are not going down the road of inquiring into subjective motivation” of the reasons why the president would deny a visa, Wall told the Fourth Circuit on Monday.

Of course, as Amy Davidson at The New Yorker observes, “Asking for a presumption of regularity, or legality, or just basic honesty, is asking a lot, when it comes to the Trump Administration.”

Examining the government’s motives

National security merely provides a pretext for banning Muslims, argues the International Refugee Assistance Project (the lead plaintiff in the case). The plaintiffs note that the president stated clearly during and after the campaign his goal of banning Muslims from coming to the U.S. Those utterances, the plaintiffs contend, provide the court with evidence to conclude that the executive order violates the Establishment clause, which prohibits the government from favoring one religion over another.

Mandel does not control the outcome in the travel ban appeal, say the plaintiffs. Instead courts must determine whether the law has a so-called secular purpose. In support of their argument, the plaintiffs cite a series of rulings, including a 1993 decision by the Supreme Court in Church of Lukumi Babalu Aye, Inc. v. City of Hialeah.

In that case, a church and its congregants practiced Santeria, which for them included ritual sacrifice of chickens, pigeons, doves, ducks, guinea pigs, goats, sheep and turtles. Prompted by the concerns of residents who did not want a Santeria church in their midst, the City of Hialeah adopted an ordinance that prohibited animal sacrifice within the municipality.

The church accused the city of aiming to exclude it in violation of the Free Exercise clause of the First Amendment. Though city officials noted that the words of the ordinance said nothing about Santeria, the analysis doesn’t end there, said the court.

Motive matters when analyzing government action that may violate the First Amendment’s guarantees of religious freedom. “Official action that targets religious conduct for distinctive treatment cannot be shielded by mere compliance with the requirement of facial neutrality,” Justice Kennedy wrote for the majority. “The Free Exercise clause protects against governmental hostility which is masked, as well as overt.”

The plaintiffs in the travel ban appeal contend that the court can infer the administration’s motive from a series of statements by the president that expressed either an intent to ban Muslims from entering the country or otherwise conveying anti-Muslim sentiments.

An example: Before signing the first travel ban, which was later overturned, Trump said, “This is the protection of the nation from foreign terrorist entry into the United States. We all know what that means.” On Monday, after a reporter asked the White House press secretary why the president’s campaign website still mentioned “preventing Muslim immigration,” the online page was erased.

“We think that the ordinary Establishment clause cases apply,” Omar Jadwat, who argued on behalf of the plaintiffs, told the judges on Monday. “There is no reason to extend Mandel to this context. I think what the court is to do is to determine whether [the order] was issued in bad faith by looking at the evidence in this case.”

Jadwat cited three categories of evidence: the order itself, Trump’s statements and facts in the record that are not statements, including an analysis by the intelligence arm of the Department of Homeland Security that the executive order would not reduce terrorism in the U.S.

A three-judge panel of the Ninth Circuit is slated to hear arguments this Monday in the government’s appeal of an order by a judge in Hawaii that blocked enforcement of the travel ban nationwide.

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Law

Judge blocks Trump move to slash funds for sanctuary cities

Donald Trump’s words keep getting in the way of his efforts to tighten the nation’s borders.

A federal judge on Wednesday halted enforcement of a presidential order that would have authorized the White House to cut off funds to cities that refuse to cooperate with enforcement of federal immigration laws.

The power to spend belongs to Congress and not to the president, said District Judge William Orrick in San Francisco, who ruled that a Jan. 25 order by the administration that authorizes defunding of so-called sanctuary cities contravenes the Constitution’s separation of powers.

Though government lawyers asserted in court that the order does not give the president authority to impose new conditions on federal grants, Orrick noted statements by the president in February, when he told former Fox News host Bill O’Reilly that the threat of defunding “would be a weapon” to use against cities that decline to honor requests by the federal government to hold inmates in local jails for up to two days after their scheduled release so that immigration officials can determine if they want to take the person into custody.

Orrick also noted remarks by Attorney General Jeff Sessions, who told reporters that the death of Kate Steinle, a San Francisco woman who allegedly was killed by an undocumented immigrant, occurred because the assailant “admitted the only reason he came to San Francisco was because it was a sanctuary city.”

“If there was doubt about the scope of the order, the president and attorney general have erased it with their comments,” wrote Orrick, who also cited comments by White House press secretary Sean Spicer that the order aimed “to get cities into compliance” with executive action.

The injunction, which applies nationwide, follows a series of rulings by federal judges that blocked enforcement of a presidential ban on travel to the U.S. by people from six predominantly Muslim countries. Judges in those cases cited public comments by the president and his surrogates that the White House sought to ban entry of Muslims into the U.S. in violation of the Constitution.

Floyd Abrams, the First Amendment lawyer who successfully defended The New York Times against efforts by the Nixon administration to stop the paper from publishing the Pentagon Papers, recently told the Times that Trump’s tweets also may provide evidence in court for claims that a possible federal prosecution of WikiLeaks would represent an effort to use the legal system to punish journalists.

The ruling by Orrick addresses accusations by the cities and counties of Santa Clara and San Francisco, which each charged that the potential for losing federal grants as result of their policies would force them to cut critical services and entitlements.

San Francisco estimated it stands to lose about $1.2 billion, or about 12.5% of its annual budget, if the White House defunded the city and county. Santa Clara said that federal funds constitute about 35% of its annual revenues.

Because the executive order fails to clarify what conduct might cause a locality to lose funds, the directive also violates the Fifth Amendment’s Due Process clause, which requires that laws lay out the conduct they prohibit, Orrick said.

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Law

Judge in Hawaii blocks revised Trump travel ban

The Trump administration has failed in its second try to ban travel to the U.S. by people from six majority Muslim countries.

The ban, which represented a do-over by the White House after its first attempt was blocked by the courts, likely violates the Constitution’s prohibition on government’s preferring one religion over another, the U.S. District Court in Honolulu ruled on Wednesday, a day before the ban was to take effect.

A “reasonable, objective observer – enlightened by the specific historical context, contemporaneous public statements, and specific sequence of events leading to its issuance – would conclude that the executive order was issued with a purpose to disfavor a particular religion,” Judge Derrick Watson wrote in a 43-page ruling that halts enforcement of the ban nationwide.

The lawsuit originated with Ismail Elshikh, Ph.D., a U.S. citizen and the Imam of the Muslim Association of Hawaii, who accuses the administration of violating the Establishment Clause of the First Amendment. In court papers, Dr. Elshikh cites a series of statements by the president, his staff and surrogates that the president set out to institute a ban on Muslims seeking entry to the U.S. Dr. Elshikh points to evidence that the travel ban is unlikely to strengthen national security.

The revised ban also contravenes the Fifth Amendment’s guarantee of due process, by preventing Dr. Elshikh’s mother-in-law, a citizen of Syria who last visited the U.S. in 2005, from obtaining a visa to visit her family in Hawaii. “Citizens may have a constitutionally protected interest in specific non-citizens’ ability to travel to the United States,” the plaintiffs write in court papers.

The State of Hawaii, the co-plaintiff in the lawsuit, alleges that the revised ban will impede its ability to recruit students and faculty from the affected countries, as well as depress travel to and tourism in the Aloha State.

President Trump called the ruling an “unprecedented judicial overreach” and vowed to appeal it to the Supreme Court. At least a dozen states have sued to block the revised travel ban.

Separately, a federal judge in Maryland ruled Thursday that enforcement of the revised travel ban would violate the Establishment Clause, citing statements by the president and administration officials.

Despite the White House’s revising its executive order with the aim of the ban’s passing constitutional muster, “the history of public statements continues to provide a convincing case that the purpose of the second executive order remains the realization of the long-envisioned Muslim ban,” Judge Theodore Chuang wrote.

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News

The Trump border wall may be a barrier to public safety

The wall that the Trump administration plans to build along the southern border may be a barrier to national security.

To help pay for the wall, the administration is considering cuts to the Coast Guard, the Transportation Security Administration, and the Federal Emergency Management Agency, the Washington Post reports.

The Coast Guard’s annual budget may be cut 14%, to about $7.8 billion. The cut would cover teams that detect weapons of mass destruction, detain smugglers, board suspect vessels and escort ships deemed to present or be at risk.

At TSA, the proposed budget would eliminate a program that sends agents and dogs to sweep airports, rail terminals and subway stations for explosives, as well as grants that local police departments use to pay for the cost of patrolling airports. Funds that FEMA uses to help state and local governments prepare for natural disasters and respond to emergencies would be slashed as well.

The proposed cuts reflect a reprioritization of security spending. Overall, the administration is considering boosting by 6.4%, to $43.8 billion, the budget for the Department of Homeland Security.

According to the Post, some $2.9 billion would go to funding the wall along the southern border. An additional $1.9 billon would pay for more immigration officers and border patrol agents, as well as beds for immigrants held in detention.

In February, the DHS published a preliminary blueprint for the wall that sheds light on what construction entails. In addition to planning, design, construction and maintenance, funds would pay for “attendant lighting, technology (including sensors), as well as patrol and access roads.”

As you might expect from this White House, the memos obligate the builders to consult with, among others, “nongovernmental entities having relevant experience” and to use “materials originated in the United States.”

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Law

Why the revised Trump travel ban may still be unconstitutional

The revised Trump travel ban may satisfy the White House and its supporters but it remains to be seen whether the edict comports with the Constitution.

In an executive order issued Monday, the administration prohibits visits to the U.S. by people from six predominantly Muslim countries. The order, which supersedes an order issued Jan. 27, includes a series of changes that are designed to withstand court challenges. The changes include a recitation of the allegedly heightened risk that visitors from Iran, Libya, Somalia, Sudan, Syria and Yemen present to national security.

The danger “of erroneously permitting entry” of a visitor from one of the six countries who may intend to commit an act of terror “is unacceptably high,” the order tells us. Yet it contains nothing that ties nationals from the affected countries directly to threats of terrorism within the U.S.

Country of citizenship “is unlikely to be a reliable indicator of potential terrorist activity,” the intelligence arm of the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) concluded in a three-page report published in February by the Associated Press. Of 82 people who engaged in activity inspired by a foreign terrorist organization since the start of the Syrian conflict in March 2011, “slightly more than half were native-born United States citizens,” according to the analysis, which DHS has termed incomplete.

The revised travel ban does include a recitation, purportedly culled from reports published annually by the State Department, that describes conditions that can breed terrorism generally in each of the six countries. But as the Economist observes, “the edit has the flavor of a student essay whose first version contained no support for its thesis and has been patched up with a visit to a couple of websites. The logic behind categorical bans from particular nations remains dubious.”

Like the order its replaces, the revised ban also suspends for four months the admission of refugees into the U.S. “The Attorney General has reported to me that more than 300 persons who entered the United States as refugees are currently the subjects of counterterrorism investigations by the Federal Bureau of Investigation,” the president writes in the revised order. But “without any context, this 300 figure is meaningless,” the Washington Post noted.

That leaves the order vulnerable to a conclusion by the courts that it remains motivated by discrimination. “The government has pointed to no evidence that any alien from any of the countries named in the order has perpetrated a terrorist attack in the United States,” a three-judge panel of the Ninth Circuit wrote in its Feb. 9 ruling denying the administration’s request to reinstate the ban after a federal judge in Seattle blocked its enforcement nationwide.

What’s more, the appeals court noted, the states that challenged the initial order offered evidence of “numerous statements” by the president of his intent to ban Muslims from entering the country. With its lack of evidence tying the travel ban to an actual threat to national security, the revised travel ban does little to undo that conclusion.

Washington state Attorney General Bob Ferguson, who sued to block the ban, said in a statement Monday that his office was reviewing the revised order to determine its impact on the state and his office’s next legal steps.

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Law

Trump expected to issue revised travel ban

President Trump is expected on Monday to sign an executive order banning travel to the U.S. by people from at least six Muslim countries that the White House hopes can withstand court challenges.

Though the extent of changes to the current order remained unclear on Sunday, they reportedly will include removing Iraq from the travel ban, which may continue to apply to visitors who arrive from Syria, Somalia, Sudan, Yemen, Iran and Libya. The order also is expected to clarify that lawful permanent residents and visa holders have due process rights and remove a provision that gave priority to refugee claims by Christians.

The Ninth Circuit last month refused to reinstate the ban, which was part of an executive order issued in January, after a federal judge blocked its effect nationwide.

The revised ban comes amid a flurry of charges by the president that his predecessor ordered investigators to listen to his phone calls during the presidential campaign as part of a government probe into alleged ties between the Trump campaign and Russia. President Obama has denied the charge.