Washington, March 11 (IANS): US President Donald Trumps revised travel executive order suffered its first legal setback as a federal judge blocked the directive’s potential impact on the family of a Syrian refugee living in Wisconsin.
Madison city-based US District Court Judge William Conley on Friday issued a temporary retraining order at the request of the Syrian man, Politico news reported.
The judge, an appointee of former President Barack Obama, said Trump’s new executive order cannot be used to delay the man’s effort to bring his wife and three-year-old daughter from Syria to the US.
“Given the daily threat to the lives to plaintiff’s wife and child remaining in Aleppo, Syria, the court further finds a significant risk of irreparable harm,” Conley said in the order.
Trump signed the new executive order on Monday banning foreign nationals from six Muslim-majority countries from entering the US for 90 days and banning all refugees for 120 days, but excluded green card holders and those with existing valid visas from the order. The original ban included Iraq, but the new order does not.
The Wisconsin order was just one of at least five expected to play out in the coming days as various states, organisations and individuals are trying to block some or all of Trump’s redrafted travel ban, reports Politico. In Maryland, a federal judge set a hearing for March 15 on a lawsuit brought by refugee aid groups. Another hearing is set to take place in front of a federal judge in Honolulu on a travel ban lawsuit brought by the state of Hawaii.
In addition, the states of Washington and Minnesota asked Seattle-based US District Court Judge James Robart to confirm that his existing injunction against key parts of Trump’s original travel ban executive order blocks similar portions of the revised directive.
