WASHINGTON: Lawyers and human rights activists took up positions at major US airports as a weakened version of President Donald Trump’s travel ban took effect late on Thursday. But there were no signs of the chaos that erupted when the first version of the restriction, derided as discriminatory against Muslims, was abruptly imposed back in January.

Attorneys working pro-bono set up makeshift, just-in-case legal aid stations — some with signs in Arabic — at airports serving New York, Los Angeles, San Francisco, Chicago, Washington and other cities, news reports said.

Protesters angry over Trump’s immigration policies also turned out, with some in Los Angeles holding black-and-white placards denouncing Trump as a fascist. But the first hours of the new version of the ban, as allowed by the Supreme Court, appeared to unfold calmly.

The Trump administration claims the temporary ban is necessary to keep terrorists out of the country, but immigrant advocates charge that it illegally singles out Muslims.

Under a Supreme Court ruling this week that allowed part of the ban to take effect — and ended, for now, five months of skirmishes in lower courts — the 90-day ban on visitors from Iran, Libya, Somalia, Sudan, Syria and Yemen, and a 120-day ban on refugees, will allow exceptions for people with “close family relationships” in the United States.

Activists said the government has defined that too narrowly, excluding relationships with grandparents and grandchildren, aunts and uncles and others.

The Department of Homeland Security, which was criticised for mishandling many arrivals when the ban was first attempted in January, said that anyone with a valid visa issued before the ban began would still be admitted, and that all authorised refugees booked for travel before July 6 would also be allowed.

Victory claims

The ban’s implementation, even with exceptions, was claimed as a political victory by Trump, after federal appeals courts twice blocked his order, saying it violated constitutional protections of religion and overshot his presidential powers.

Immigrant rights groups and Democrats in Congress continued to term Trump’s order illegal and said the exemptions provided in a Supreme Court ruling on Monday remained unfair.

According to guidelines issued by the State Department, people with “close family relationships” would be exempt from the ban. It defined that to include parents, spouses, children, sons- and daughters-in-law, siblings and step- and half-siblings.

People with formal relationships with a US entity — who have for instance been offered a job or been accepted to study or lecture at a university — will also qualify for visas during the ban.

Even as travel officials across the US made final preparations for putting the ban into place, opponents were preparing new legal challenges.

Late on Thursday, Hawaii asked federal district Judge Derrick Watson to clarify the scope of the travel and refugee bans in the Pacific island state — and to define who, specifically, the ban refers to when stating that only an immigrant’s close family members can travel to the US.

“In Hawaii, ‘close family’ includes many of the people that the federal government decided on its own to exclude from that definition. Unfortunately, this severely limited definition may be in violation of the Supreme Court ruling,” Hawaii’s Attorney General Douglas Chin said in a statement.

Rama Issa, executive director of the Arab American Association of New York, said the government was redefining what a family is. “I was raised by my grandparents, so the idea of grandparents not being part of a family is very foreign to me,” Issa said at JFK, preparing to help new arrivals.

Published in Dawn, July 1st, 2017