US lawyers ‘ready to litigate’ Trump over new ‘anti-Muslim’ travel ban

Donald Trump’s newly-reworded executive order to clamp down on immigrants from Muslim-majority countries has been declared equally discriminatory as the first ban and could still be challenged in the courts, according to lawyers.

The President’s new order scraps certain provisions of the first one, such as banning people from Iraq, indefinitely suspending Syrian refugees and ensnaring people with valid visas and green cards, but the “intent remains the same”, according to Karen Tumlin, legal director of the National Immigration Law Center.

“So, Muslim Ban 1.0 has been revoked and replaced with this, equally discriminatory & unlawful version 2.0,” she wrote on Twitter.

The order has sent a signal that it is “open season” for denigrating civil rights, said Simon Sandoval-Moshenberg of the Legal Aid Justice Center. He fought to protect his clients from the first ban, including two Yemeni brothers who had been put on a return flight to Ethiopia as soon as they landed in the US last month.

Donald Trump’s new ‘Muslim ban’ still excludes countries of terrorists

He admitted that the scope of the new order has been widely reduced and would affect far fewer people than before – 60,000 visas were revoked the first time around – but it was still only being re-introduced to score political points, he said…

MORE: US lawyers ‘ready to litigate’ Trump over new ‘anti-Muslim’ travel ban | The Independent