[National Review] In sustaining President Trump’s so-called travel ban, the Supreme Court has vindicated "the authority of the Presidency itself," not the sometimes overheated campaign rhetoric of the incumbent president, as Chief Justice John Roberts wrote today for the narrow majority.On the merits, Trump v. Hawaii was a straightforward case. The proclamation issued by the president in September 2017 (the last refinement of earlier iterations) was not actually a "ban" on travel. It placed restrictions on the nationals of eight countries that present extraordinary challenges for visa vetting because their governments are either dysfunctional or hostile to the United States ‐ Chad, Iran, Libya, North Korea, Syria, Venezuela, Yemen, and Somalia (the last added when Iraq was removed from the original list).
Aliens have no constitutional right to enter the United States and, as the Court’s majority observed, the admission and exclusion of foreign nationals is a "fundamental sovereign attribute exercised by the Government’s political departments largely immune from judicial control." In that connection, Congress has enacted section 1182(f) of federal immigration law (Title 8 of the U.S. Code), which vests broad authority in the president to suspend the entry of classes of aliens ‐ which includes setting conditions and time-frames on such suspensions ‐ if the president unilaterally concludes that their admission "would be detrimental to the interests of the United States."
Quite apart from the fact that Trump was thus acting at the apex of his authority (in an area of core presidential responsibility with sweeping statutory support), the travel restrictions were imposed only after an exhaustive process in which executive agencies responsible for visa-issuance decisions evaluated every country in the world for compliance with U.S. needs for information-sharing and risk-assessment. The majority noted that the twelve-page proclamation was more detailed with factual findings than any ever issued under the statute. The restrictions imposed were not based on nationality per se, much less religion, but on inadequacies in addressing risks. There was, in addition, a proviso that the "conditional restrictions" would remain in force only as long as the cited countries failed to address the problems identified. And, indeed, the chief justice pointed out that three countries ‐ Iraq, Sudan, and Chad ‐ have been removed from the list.