
The Supreme Court said on Monday that the six country Muslim Travel Ban can go into effect late Thursday morning. As of this writing, the Trump administration still has no guidance ready for the Customs and Border Patrol (CBP) that will have to enforce the ban.
The Supreme Court said that the travel ban can only be applied to people with no bona fide relationship to a U.S. person or entity. It offered little explanation of what that means apart from a few examples. The Court left it to the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) to fill in the blanks. So far, the DHS has failed in that mission.
Randall Chamberlain, Secretary of the New York Chapter of the American Immigration Lawyers Association (AILA) sent out an e-mail after hours Wednesday evening to his members that reads:
The JFK CBP Port Director has informed us that no official guidance has been released yet about the partial re-instatement of the travel ban but has authorized us to share the following: “We expect the EO to go into effect at 8 pm tomorrow [Thursday] evening. The impact at the ports will be minimal, because all individuals already in possession of valid visas will be authorized to travel.”
This does not tell us what the situation will be in future weeks, but at least for now, there should be no mass detentions at Kennedy.