The Trump administration signaled it will challenge a federal ruling delivered in Maryland on Wednesday that temporarily blocked a portion of President Donald Trump’s revised travel ban, Bloomberg reports.
Acting Solicitor General Jeffrey Wall signed the appeal Friday, which he filed in Greenbelt, Maryland, rather than in Hawaii, where a federal judge issued a similar decision this week to block parts of the executive order.
That means the more conservative Fourth Circuit appeals court will hear the case instead of its San Francisco-based sister court, the Ninth Circuit, where Hawaii’s appeals cases are districted and whose reputation for liberalism precedes it. In February, the Ninth Circuit unanimously ruled against reinstating the first version of Trump’s travel ban.
Carl Tobias, a law professor at the University of Richmond in Virginia, told Bloomberg that the Fourth Circuit “used to be the most conservative court in the country,” though he notes that’s no longer true.
The twin decisions made this week in Hawaii and Maryland mean that travelers from Syria, Iran, Yemen, Libya, Sudan, and Somalia (as well as refugees at large) can continue to enter the United States; Trump referred to the ruling in Hawaii as “unprecedented judicial overreach.”
