A federal judge in Maryland has blocked parts of President Trump’s most recent travel ban, dealing a second blow to Trump’s effort to block citizens from eight countries from entering the United States. In Wednesday’s ruling, Maryland District Judge Theodore Chuang said President Trump’s own words convinced the judge that the latest ban is an “inextricable re-animation of the twice-enjoined Muslim ban.” This ruling comes only one day after a federal judge in Hawaii blocked most of the latest version of the travel ban just hours before it was set to take effect.
The two rulings temporarily halt the parts of the ban that would have blocked all citizens from Iran, Libya, Syria, Yemen, Somalia and Chad from entering the United States. Both the Maryland and Hawaii orders do allow the part of the ban blocking some North Koreans and Venezuelan government officials to go into effect.
This is Trump’s third proposed travel ban—and the first to include Chad, a small African nation that has been an ally to the United States. More details have now surfaced to show that it appears Chad was included in part because it had run out of special passport paper, and therefore failed to submit a recent sample of its passports to the U.S. Homeland Security Department.
