Is 'extreme vetting' unconstitutional?
Alan Yuhas
Friday 27 January 2017 21.54 EST
... The executive actions include a halt to the Syrian refugee program, a 120-day pause on all refugee admissions, and blocking entry for people from seven Muslim-majority countries for 90 days: Iraq, Syria, Libya, Somalia, Sudan, Iran and Yemen. In an interview on Friday, Trump told the Christian Broadcasting Network that he would make exceptions for Christian migrants. The order prioritizes refugee claims on the basis of religious persecution if the applicant belongs to “a minority religion in the individual’s country of nationality”.
Legal scholars have been divided for months about whether Trump’s proposals would hold under the constitution. Congress and the White House share authority to decide eligibility for citizenship and entry into the country, and the supreme court has never directly confronted whether religion could stand as a valid reason to exclude some people over others ...
In the 1890s, the court upheld a ban on Chinese immigrants, but those cases were about race – and the arguments behind them have been abandoned. In 1972, the court ruled 6-3 that the White House could bar a Marxist Belgian from entering the US, deferring to the president’s discretion ...
In the 1972 case Kleindienst v Mandel, the court kept the door open to future challenges, saying the White House needed reasons that were “facially legitimate and bona fide” ...
https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2017/jan/27/trump-muslim-vetting-constitutional
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