Donald Trump has hailed a Supreme Court decision to uphold his controversial travel ban as a “tremendous success”. The ban targets people from several majority Muslim countries, has attracted heavy criticism from refugee and human rights groups and from other world leaders.
Trump’s highly controversial policy applies to travelers from five countries with overwhelmingly Muslim populations: Iran, Libya, Somalia, Syria and Yemen.
America’s top court rejected a challenge that the ban discriminated against Muslims or exceeded the president’s authority by a 5-4 majority.
Mr Trump said the Supreme Court decision was a “great victory” for the nation and constitution.
“We have to be tough and we have to be safe and we have to be secure,” the Republican president said in Tuesday’s meeting with lawmakers.
“The ruling shows that all the attacks from the media and the Democrat politicians were wrong, and they turned out to be very wrong,” he added.
He also told, “If you look at the European Union, they’re meeting right now to toughen up their immigration policies because they’ve been over-run, they’ve been over-run.
“And frankly, a lot of those countries are not the same places anymore.”
Chief Justice John Roberts, who wrote the opinion, said the ban was “squarely within the scope of Presidential authority”.
But the judge was careful not to endorse Mr Trump’s provocative statements about immigration in general and Muslims in particular
“We express no view on the soundness of the policy,” Chief Justice Roberts wrote.
“It leaves undisturbed a policy first advertised openly and unequivocally as a ‘total and complete shutdown of Muslims entering the United States’ because the policy now masquerades behind a facade of national-security concerns,” Justice Sotomayor wrote.
“The Muslim ban’s bigotry should have been as clear to the supreme court as it is to the Muslims demonized by it,” a statement from the Council on American-Islamic Relations (Cair) said.
“Apparently, everyone but the supreme court can see the decision for what it is: an expression of animosity.”
>Juthy Saha
