June 26, 2018 — New York
AJC is deeply disappointed that the United States Supreme Court, in a 5-4 decision, upheld President Trump’s December “Proclamation” barring immigrants from seven countries.
In an amicus brief, AJC had called on the Supreme Court to affirm a lower court’s ruling that the travel ban “conflicts with the Immigration and Nationality Act’s prohibition on nationality-based discrimination in the issuance of immigrant visas.”
AJC General Counsel Marc D. Stern issued the following statement today:
“In making this ruling under an unusually relaxed standard of review, the Supreme Court has chosen to lend its prestige to presidential action motivated by sheer religious animus. The ban is repugnant to bedrock American values of religious equality and openness to immigrants from around the world.
“The Court’s decision today should not be the last word. The Court left open the possibility of further legal challenges to the Proclamation. Congress can and should amend the immigration laws to deny the President the authority to implement this morally offensive order. And if the Administration does not do so itself, Congress should insist that the Administration implement the Proclamation’s waiver program, which, as several members of the Court indicated, presently appears to be little more than a sham.
“There is a tremendous irony in the fact that the Court chose this tragic ruling as the vehicle for the long overdue overruling of the Japanese exclusion case, Korematsu v United States. We are confident that today’s decision will, in time, suffer the same fate as that infamous decision.”
