AUSTIN – Attorney General Ken Paxton has filed a friend-of-the-court brief signed by other state attorneys general with the U.S. Supreme Court in regards to President Donald Trump's travel ban.
The brief was filed in February.
The friend-of-the-court brief supports the 2017 travel ban issued by Trump that barred travelers from seven Muslim-majority nations from flying into the U.S., which has been challenged in both the 4th and 9th U.S. Circuit Courts of Appeal before the Supreme Court stepped in and temporarily enacted the ban before a final decision is reached.
“President Trump’s highest obligation is to ensure the safety and security of all Americans, and with his latest travel ban, he is fulfilling that sacred responsibility,” Paxton, who was the first attorney general to back President Trump’s travel ban, said in a press release.
Attorneys general from Alabama, Arizona, Arkansas, Florida, Indiana, Kansas, Louisiana, Missouri, Ohio, Oklahoma, South Carolina, South Dakota and West Virginia, as well as the governors of Maine and Mississippi, have all signed the brief, which is broken down into two arguments: “The Proclamation complies with the Immigration and Nationality Act” and “The Proclamation does not violate the Establishment Clause.”
“The travel ban is constitutional and vital to upgrading both vetting and national security procedures that will help protect the nation from terrorism. The president is invoking executive powers embodied in the Constitution, authorized by Congress and used 44 times by a bipartisan list of former presidents without a legal challenge,” Paxton said in the press release.
Since Paxton put out his press release, Reuters reported on April 2 more than two dozen select law firms filed their own briefs that support the State of Hawaii counter to the president’s executive order.
“Hawaii argues the government is advancing an ‘unprecedented’ theory of the president’s unilateral power to control immigration, at odds with separation of powers doctrine, religious freedom and the Immigration and Naturalization Act,” according to Reuters.
However, Paxton does not see it that way. Citing dozens of cases in the 33-page multi-state coalition supported brief, states that “the injunction cannot be justified on the basis that the president lacked or violated statutory authority to issue the Proclamation,” according to the brief. “The Proclamation comports with Congress’s scheme that grants the President sweeping power, under 8 U.S.C. § 1182(f), to restrict alien entry into the United States.”
"The Proclamation’s 'facially legitimate and bona fide reason' for the exclusion of the covered aliens ... demonstrates that its purpose was to achieve national-security and foreign-policy goals, not to effectuate anti-Muslim bias," the brief states.