The U.S. Supreme Court has ruled, in a 5-4 decision written by Chief Justice Roberts, for the Trump administration and reversed a grant of preliminary injunction in the Muslim travel ban, sending the case back to the lower courts. Dissenting Justices Sonya Sotomayor and Ruth Bader Ginsberg likened the ruling to Korematsu, the decision that declared the internment of Japanese-American citizens during World War II was constitutional, writing:
The United States of American is a Nation built upon the promise of religious liberty. […] The Court's decision today fails to safeguard that fundamental principle. 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 no masquerades behind a façade of national security concerns. But this repackaging does little to cleanse Presidential Proclamation No. 9645 of the appearance of discrimination that the President's words have created.
Reading from the opinion, Roberts dismissed Trump's statements, saying "the issue before us is not whether to denounce the statements. It is instead the significance of those statements in reviewing a Presidential directive, neutral on its face, addressing a matter within the core of executive responsibility." The majority says Trump's order is "squarely within the scope of Presidential authority under the INA {Immigration and Nationality Act], and that the Court "will uphold the policy so long as it can reasonably be understood to result from a justification independent of unconstitutional grounds."
It concludes that "under these circumstances, the Government has set forth a sufficient national security justification to survive rational basis review. We express no view on the soundness of the policy. We simply hold today that plaintiffs have not demonstrated a likelihood of success on the merits of their constitutional claim."
