Iran keeps ban on US visitors

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TEHRAN, March 7, (Agencies): Iran said Tuesday it would continue its retaliatory measure of barring US visitors in response to US President Donald Trump’s updated travel ban on predominantly Muslim countries. “Our earlier counter-measure against Trump’s previous order is still in place,” said deputy foreign minister Majid Takht Ravanchi at a conference entitled “What to do about Trump’s America”.

“There is no need for a new decision,” he said, according to the ISNA news agency. Iran’s foreign ministry announced in January it would ban Americans from entering the country in response to Trump’s “insulting” order restricting arrivals from Iran and six other Muslim states. It called the decision “illegal, illogical and contrary to international rules”.

The White House re-issued the ban on Monday — this time excluding Iraq but still targeting Iranians — following legal challenges. Trump’s ban was halted by a federal court in February, allowing an Iranian archery team into the US. Iran reciprocated by allowing entry to an American wrestling team for a competition. Iranians have been the most affected by the ban since more than one million live, work and study in the United States.

The new, more narrowly tailored temporary travel ban President Donald Trump signed on Monday will be more difficult to challenge successfully in court, legal experts said. They said that since his order no longer covers legal residents or existing visa holders, and makes waivers possible for some business, diplomatic and other travelers, challengers are likely to have a harder time finding people in the United States who can legally claim they have been harmed, and thus have so-called “standing” to sue. Trump’s first executive order signed on Jan 27 banned travelers from seven Muslim-majority nations — Iran, Iraq, Libya, Somalia, Sudan, Syria and Yemen — for 90 days and halted refugee admission for four months, barring Syrian refugees indefinitely.

Its hasty implementation caused chaos and protests at airports. The order was hit with more than two dozen lawsuits, many that claimed it discriminated against Muslims. The new ban, which goes into effect on March 16, removes Iraq and adds categories of people who would be exempt from the order. The Trump administration said the executive order is necessary for national security reasons. It also lists groups of people that could be eligible for waivers, including travelers who have previously been admitted to the United States for work or school, those seeking to visit or live with a close relative and who would face hardship if denied entry; infants, young children and adoptees or people in need of medical care, employees of the US government and international organizations among others. All the exceptions make the new order “a lot harder to attack,” said Andrew Greenfield, an immigration attorney with Fragomen law firm in Washington D.C. Trump had promised to make the new directive harder to fight in court and many of the changes were expected. “They dotted their ‘i’s’ and crossed their ‘t’s’ in trying to anticipate what litigation might result,” said Stephen Yale-Loehr, a Cornell Law School professor who specializes in immigration. He said opponents might still be able to find plaintiffs — a US citizen could potentially sue if the government denies a waiver to their foreign spouse for an arbitrary reason, for example.

In a legal challenge to the original order, the state of Washington was successful in preventing it from being carried out. A federal judge in Seattle and then an appeals court in San Francisco ruled that Washington could claim standing, in part because the order adversely affected legal permanent residents, known as green card holders, in the state.

More than 100 businesses, including many of the best-known tech companies, filed briefs in court that argued their employees were harmed. Bob Ferguson, the Attorney General for Washington State said on Monday that he will likely decide on the next litigation steps this week after consulting with state universities and businesses about potential harms. “We need to do our homework and be thoughtful about this,” Ferguson said. The US Department of Justice, in a filing in Seattle federal court on Monday, said the new order applies “only to those who are overseas and without a visa.”

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