The president has broad power to control immigration. A federal law allows him to “suspend the entry of all aliens or any class of aliens as immigrants or nonimmigrants” if he determines that their entry “would be detrimental to the interests of the United States.”
But another law appears to limit that power, saying that “no person shall receive any preference or priority or be discriminated against in the issuance of an immigrant visa because of the person’s race, sex, nationality, place of birth or place of residence.”…
It is possible that one of the four cases will definitively resolve an important aspect of the legality of Mr. Trump’s order. But the cases were filed very quickly, and civil rights litigators generally like to locate ideal plaintiffs and hone their legal theories before filing test cases that could turn into legal landmarks.
The Brooklyn case, for instance, did not make a claim based on the First Amendment’s prohibition of government establishment of religion, though some lawyers said that was the executive order’s central flaw.
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