The state of Hawaii said it will ask a federal court on Wednesday for an emergency halt to President Donald Trump’s new executive order restricting travel from six Muslim-majority countries, becoming the first state to challenge the ban in court.
In a court filing on Tuesday, Hawaii said it would seek a temporary restraining order against the new travel ban. Hawaii’s suit against the original executive order was put on hold.
The Trump administration this week issued the new executive order that supplanted an earlier, more sweeping one which had been challenged in court by several states in addition to Hawaii.
The new order is much more narrowly tailored than the first one issued in January. It keeps a 90-day ban on travel to the United States by citizens of Iran, Libya, Syria, Somalia, Sudan and Yemen but excludes Iraq, and applies the restriction only to new visa applicants.
“To be sure, the new executive order covers fewer people than the old one,” Neal Katyal, one of the lead attorneys for Hawaii, said in an interview with CNN. He said the new travel ban still “suffers from the same constitutional and statutory defects.”
“We are confident that the president’s actions are lawful to protect the national security of our country,” the Justice Department said in a statement.
