WASHINGTON: US President Donald Trump said on Friday that he would go to court against an appeals court’s refusal to unfreeze a judicial stay on the execution of his travel ban.

And a White House official refused to rule out the possibility of President Trump issuing another executive order to implement his Jan 27 travel ban. The original order, which stops visitors from seven Muslim countries for 90 days and halts all immigrations for 120 days, was stayed last week by a court in Seattle, Washington.

And on Thursday, an appeals court in San Francisco upheld that freeze. In a unanimous opinion, a three-judge panel on the US Court of Appeals found that the administration had failed to show why the travel ban should be restored immediately.

“It’s a political decision. We will see them in the court and I look forward to do it,” President Trump told reporters at the White House. “We have a situation where the security of our country is at stake and it’s a very, very serious situation. So, we look forward, as I just said, to seeing them in court.”

And when CNN asked a White House official if Mr. Trump was considering signing a new executive order in the wake of the court’s decision, he said: “Nothing’s off the table.”

President Trump, however, was confident that the Supreme Court will rule in his favour. “It’s a decision that we will win, in my opinion, very easily. And by the way, we won that decision in Boston,” said the president while referring to an earlier verdict that went in his favour but the freeze by the Seattle court prevented the government from implementing the order.

In his tweet on Friday, President Trump criticised the appeals court for not undoing the stay order. “Remarkably, in the entire opinion, the panel did not bother even to cite this (the) statute. A disgraceful decision,” he said.

Mr Trump was referring to a statue that was highlighted by a legal site, Lawfare, which says that “whenever the President finds that the entry of any aliens or of any class of aliens into the United States would be detrimental to the interests of the United States, he may by proclamation, and for such period as he shall deem necessary, suspend the entry of all aliens or any class of aliens as immigrants or non-immigrants, or impose on the entry of aliens any restrictions he may deem to be appropriate.”

In a unanimous 29-page opinion, three judges from the US Court of Appeals rejected the administration’s argument that the stay order should be lifted immediately for national security reasons.

The judges also said that the judiciary had the authority to serve as a check on the president’s power. The government’s argument that a court could not second-guess the president’s executive order “runs contrary to the fundamental structure of our constitutional democracy,” the judges said.

“It is beyond question that the federal judiciary retains the authority to adjudicate constitutional challenges to executive action,” they wrote.

Published in Dawn, February 11th, 2017