A White House official sai on Wednesday that Donald Trump is pushing back the release of his revised executive order on travel and refugees until next week. Trump had said that a revamped executive order, tailored to address legal issues that blocked his original travel ban, would be released this week. No explanation was given for the delay, and it remains unclear how the White House will tweak the travel ban to prevent future legal challenges.
“Fundamentally you’re going to have the same basic policy outcome for the country,” White House policy adviser Stephen Miller said on Fox News on Tuesday night. He said the new order will largely resemble the old one, but that the changes will be “mostly minor technical differences.”
During a speech at the White House last Thursday Trump said that "new order is going to be very much tailored to what I consider a very, very bad decision. We can tailor the order to the decision to get just as much.”
White House officials have been scrambling to draft a new executive order, after initially threatening to take the 9th Circuit court of appeals to the Supreme Court, while stressing they are taking steps to ensure a smoother rollout than the last one. The initial ban temporarily blocked travelers from seven Muslim-majority countries from entering the U.S. and suspended refugee resettlement for at least four months. It indefinitely blocked Syrian refugees from entering the country.
After chaos ensued when the original ban was handed down on Jan. 27, resulting in hundreds of travelers being stranded at airports around the country amid confusion about whether the policy applied to people in transit and legal permanent residents, various legal challenges were filed against the order. The Department of Homeland Security days later clarified the order did not apply to permanent residents.
But that did not stop a federal judge in Washington from issuing a nationwide restraining order halting the ban, which was later upheld by a three-judge panel of the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals. The White House has signaled it intends to continue the legal fight even though Justice Department lawyers said in a court filing the administration planned to rescind the initial order.
In a separate action, the administration on Tuesday outlined a sweeping crackdown on undocumented immigrants that officials said would result in the swift deportation of many more people without court hearings and target migrants charged with crimes or thought to be dangerous, not just convicts.