US SC to hear Trump's travel ban 3.0 challenge in April

The US Supreme Court has announced it would consider a legal challenge to President Donald Trumps latest version of ban on travel to the US by residents of six majority-Muslim countries.

The justices said on Friday that they plan to hear arguments in April and issue a final ruling by late June, CNN reported.

The court said it will consider questions concerning whether the ban violates immigration law as well as the Establishment Clause of the Constitution.

Late last year, the justices allowed the entire travel ban issued in September to go into effect pending appeal.

The court's eventual ruling will determine the fate of the third attempt of the Trump administration to restrict entry to people from Chad, Iran, Libya, Somalia, Syria and Yemen. The ban also affects two non-Muslim countries, North Korea and Venezuela.

It marked the second time the Supreme Court agreed to hear the issue.

Lower courts in two separate challenges had partially blocked the ban. A three-judge panel of judges on the 9th US Circuit Court of Appeals ruled last year that travel ban 3.0 exceeded the President's authority, calling it "an executive override of broad swathes of immigration laws that Congress has used its considered judgment to enact".

However, the Trump administration maintained that the President had the authority to install travel bans in order to protect national security.

--IANS

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