President Donald Trump said Thursday that he would issue a new executive order next week “tailored” to a federal appeals court decision that blocked his travel ban on citizens from seven Muslim-majority nations.
In a wide-reaching and aggressive news conference from the East Room, Trump blasted the 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals ruling against him, but said nonetheless that he would issue a new order next week that would withstand legal scrutiny.
“As far as the new order, the new order is going to be very much tailored to what I consider to be a very bad decision, but we can tailor the order to that decision and get just about everything and in some ways more. But we are tailoring it now to the decision,” Trump said.
Under fire for halting his sweeping temporary halt on immigrants from seven Muslim-majority countries, Trump had vowed to fight against a ruling that he said usurped his presidential authority and put the country at risk.
Trump’s order cited national security as the reason he was barring indefinitely the entry of refugees from Syria, placing a 120-day moratorium on refugee admissions from other countries and freezing for 90 days the entry of anyone from the seven named countries.
In court filings Thursday, the Justice Department said the president would “rescind” the original order and replace it with a new, revised executive order.
“Rather than continuing this litigation, the president intends in the near future to rescind the order and replace it with a new, substantially revised executive order to eliminate what the panel erroneously thought were constitutional concerns,” the Justice Department’s brief said.
The new order is going to be very much tailored to what I consider to be a very bad decision.
President Donald Trump
The Justice Department filed its 30-page brief at 10:49 a.m. Pacific time, just as Trump’s news conference was taking place.
The states of Washington and Minnesota, which brought the lawsuit against the White House, had filed their brief two minutes earlier, reminding the court that “Donald Trump campaigned on the promise that he would ban Muslims from entering the United States.”
Trump didn’t give much information on what the new order would be.
One idea the president is considering is suspend the nation’s refugee program “in its entirety” instead of blocking travel from the seven countries, according to Kansas Secretary of State Kris Kobach, an immigration hard-liner who says he helped Trump write previous immigration executive orders.
“I don’t want to say for certain what’s happening, but people will know soon enough what I’ll be doing and where I’ll be,” Kobach said in an interview with KMUW Public Radio in Wichita.
During the news conference, Trump said that about 80 percent of the 9th Circuit’s arguments had been overturned by the Supreme Court from 2010 to 2015.
Nonetheless, he said the new order would be written to avoid further problems.
“We have some of the best lawyers in the country working on it,” Trump said.
Anita Kumar and Michael Doyle contributed to this article.
Email: fordonez@mcclatchydc.com; Twitter: @francoordonez.