Texas is lending a legal hand to the Trump administration. Weeks after a federal judge in Hawaii blocked President Trump's revised immigration order, Texas is leading a coalition of 15 states filing a legal brief in support of the order. Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton filed the amicus (friend of the court) brief this week with the 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals, which is now hearing the case. The brief lays out the legal arguments for the President's action. "The revised immigration order is constitutional, lawful, addresses the 9th Circuit's concerns and is a vital step in securing our borders," wrote Paxton in a statement.
William Gheen with Americans for Legal Immigration PAC (ALIPAC) agrees that the President is on solid legal ground. "The President clearly has the authority, when the United States faces dangerous threats from people coming in through any process, to shut down that system and stop foreign nationals from entering the United States," he tells KTRH. Gheen also disagrees with the Hawaiian judge's ruling that the executive order was akin to a religious ban. "There are many Muslim nations that are not on the travel ban, so it is not a Muslim ban," he says.
Regardless of how the 9th Circuit rules, the order is likely to ultimately end up before the Supreme Court. Nevertheless, activists like Gheen still want to see the Trump Administration do more to address domestic immigration issues. For instance, ALIPAC is calling on President Trump to repeal President Obama's order that granted amnesty to younger illegal immigrants who were brought to the U.S. as children. "The travel ban and things like that, they're great tools but they're not going to help if we don't equally enforce our immigration laws across the board for all classes of illegal immigrants," says Gheen.