Last week, the Supreme Court in Trump v. Hawaii upheld President Trump’s travel ban that targeted several Muslim-majority countries, saying that the president had statuary authority to make national security judgements regarding immigration, despite anti-Muslim statements that he has made. In her dissent, Justice Sonia Sotomayor says the decision is no better than the one in Korematsu v. United States, the universally criticized and much maligned 1944 decision that allowed for the detention of Japanese-Americans during World War II. While Sotomayer praises the court for repudiating Korematsu in Trump v. Hawaii, she writes in her dissent: “By blindly accepting the Government’s misguided invitation to sanction a discriminatory policy motivated by animosity toward a disfavored group, all in the name of a superficial claim of national security, the Court redeploys the same dangerous logic underlying Korematsu and merely replaces one ‘gravely wrong’ decision with another.”
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