Trump Immigration Ban Faces Legal Battles (Video)

President Trump continued his assault on mainstream polling on Monday morning, tweeting that any poll showing his controversial immigration ban is unpopular is “fake news” and asserting his internal statistics are superior.

The tweets come as Trump tries to galvanize support for his orders placing restrictions on travelers from seven countries and pausing Syrian refugee resettlement. The Justice Department is currently fighting against a federal judge’s ruling halting those executive actions.

President Trump is barreling into a confrontation with the courts barely two weeks after taking office, foreshadowing years of legal battles as an administration determined to disrupt the existing order presses the boundaries of executive power.

Lawyers for the administration were ordered to submit a brief on Monday defending Mr. Trump’s order temporarily banning refugees from around the world and all visitors from seven predominantly Muslim countries from entering the United States. An appeals court in California refused on Sunday to reinstate the ban after a lower court blocked it.

President Donald Trump’s temporary immigration ban faced on Monday the first of several crucial legal hurdles that could determine whether he can push through the most controversial and far reaching policy of his first two weeks in office.

On Monday, the government has a deadline to justify the executive order temporarily barring immigrants from seven mostly Muslim countries and the entry of refugees after a federal judge in Seattle blocked it with a temporary restraining order on Friday.

The Trump administration faces several hurdles in its effort to permanently reinstate an executive order that bans travelers from seven majority-Muslim nations as well as refugees.

By blocking enforcement of the measure Friday, a federal district judge in Washington state set up a judicial process that appears to favor immigration rights groups and other opponents to the ban at every potential stage of the process.

On Sunday night, technology giants Apple, Facebook, Google, Microsoft, Netflix, Twitter, Uber and many others filed a legal brief opposing the administration’s contentious entry ban, according to people familiar with the matter. The move represents a rare coordinated action across a broad swath of the industry — 97 companies in total— and demonstrates the depth of animosity toward the Trump ban.

The amicus brief was filed with the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 9th Circuit, which is expected to rule within a few days on an appeal by the administration after a federal judge in Seattle issued late Friday a temporary restraining order putting the entry ban on hold. The brief comes at the end of a week of nationwide protests against the plan — as well as a flurry of activity in Silicon Valley, a region that sees immigration as central to its identity as an innovation hub.