Hawaii officials dismayed with Supreme Court travel ban ruling

It was a hard fight, but Hawaii ultimately took it on the chin Tuesday when the U.S. Supreme Court upheld the third version of President Donald Trump’s travel ban affecting a handful of mostly Muslim countries.

A divided court allowed the travel ban as the conservative majority gave the president a huge victory over a policy in which the state of Hawaii took the lead position in fighting.

Among the island leaders who expressed disappointment Tuesday was Lt. Gov. Doug Chin, who led Hawaii’s effort to overturn the ban in his previous job as state attorney general.

“What happened today was very disturbing,” Chin told about 60 sign-toting supporters at a rally against the ruling at the Federal Court Building on Ala Moana Boulevard. “We are in a battle for our nation’s soul and conscience.”

In an earlier interview, Chin said that while he anticipated a split decision, he was actually hopeful it might fall Hawaii’s way, with Justice Anthony Kennedy swinging his vote against the ban.

Kennedy, Chin said, recently had taken offense to religious bias expressed by a Colorado civil service commissioner in the Masterpiece Cakeshop case, which upheld a business owner’s right on religious grounds to refuse service to a same-sex marriage ceremony.

“So we were hopeful he would hold that same standard on the president (for his anti-Muslim remarks),” Chin said. “It’s disappointing the Supreme Court is willing to hold the president of the United States to a lesser standard. You’d think the court would hold the president to a higher standard.”

Chin said that while Hawaii’s efforts led to some compromise by the administration, ultimately the decision represents “a dark chapter.”

“But I think the next generation is going to look at what’s happened here, and they are going to make the right decisions favoring diversity, favoring multiple cultures and just standing up for what the Constitution is founded on,” he said.

Hawaii originally went to court in February 2017, targeting the president’s second proposed travel ban. In October Hawaii federal court Judge Derrick K. Watson blocked the third travel ban — a ruling that was upheld on appeal by the 9th Circuit Court of Appeals two months later.

After Tuesday’s decision all the members of Hawaii’s congressional delegation released statements condemning the ruling, as did Gov. David Ige and state Attorney General Russell Suzuki.

Meanwhile, Hakim Ouansafi, president of the Muslim Association of Hawaii, said he was feeling “a great deal of sadness.”

“At the end of the day, they may have given a rubber stamp of approval, but it doesn’t make it right. It doesn’t make it moral. It does not make it consistent with what this country was built on: immigration, compassion, mercy.”

Joshua Wisch, executive director of the ACLU of Hawai‘i and former special assistant to Chin, called the court’s decision a shameful one that will go down in history with decisions like Kore­matsu (Japanese internment) and Dred Scott (slavery).

“Both of those decisions are recognized now as failures of the court, as this will be,” Wisch said. “But a key difference is that with Korematsu the country was silent to the discrimination that was occurring. But this time — from the airports to the streets to the courts — people in Hawaii and across the country expressed their outrage at this policy and their support for their neighbors. We need that to continue.”

Neal Katyal, former deputy solicitor general in the Obama administration and the man who argued against the travel ban on behalf of Hawaii at the Supreme Court, called for congressional action in response to the ruling.

“Over the past year, a suit brought by ordinary Americans has made its way through the federal courts, and at every step the judiciary forced the White House to amend their travel bans to bring them more in line with our Constitution,” he wrote on Twitter. “While we continue to believe that this third version fails that test, there is no question that by striking down the first two travel bans, the judiciary forced a recalcitrant administration to at least give its order the veil of constitutionality.”