The Department of Justice asked the Supreme Court Monday to stay parts of a lower court's ruling which placed substantial restrictions on the administration's travel ban.
The 9th Circuit Court of Appeals issued a ruling last week blocking the administration from denying entrance to refugees who have formal assurances from resettlement agencies or are in the U.S. Refugee Admissions Program, The Hill reports. The court also said that the government could not block the immigration of grandparents, aunts, uncles, and other extended family members.
The 9th Circuit's ruling applies to the executive order, issued by President Donald Trump in the early days of his administration, which blocks travelers from Iran, Libya, Somalia, Sudan, Syria and Yemen from entering the U.S. for 90 days following its implementation.
Acting Solicitor General Jeffrey Wall condemned the court's ruling on the prohibition on blocking refugees.
"Unlike students who have been admitted to study at an American university, workers who have accepted jobs at an American company, and lecturers who come to speak to an American audience, refugees do not have any freestanding connection to resettlement agencies, separate and apart from the refugee-admissions process itself, by virtue of the agencies’ assurance agreement with the government. Nor can the exclusion of an assured refugee plausibly be thought to 'burden' a resettlement agency in the relevant sense," Wall wrote in the request to the Supreme Court for a stay.
If implemented, Wall argued, the 9th Circuit's orders would result in "precisely the type of uncertainty and confusion that the government has worked diligently to avoid" in its implementation of the order so far.
The Supreme Court has previously been comparatively friendly to the travel ban, preliminarily upholding most of it in a ruling in June while carving out an exemption for a would-be traveler with an established relationship with a person or entity in the U.S.
The Court will hear arguments relating to the travel ban in October.