DAY 161: Trump defies Supreme Court on Muslim ban and applies arbitrary guidelines

In a clearly wrong application of the Supreme Court's orders, the Trump administration issued conflicting guidelines on how to enforce the requirement of having "close family" ties to people in the six countries in Donald Trump's Muslim ban.

The guideliness will consider "close family", and thus grant entry, to parents, spouses, children and stepchildren, but not to grandparents nor to aunts, uncles, nephews, nieces, cousins, brothers-in-law, sisters-in-law, and fiances.

According to The New York Times, the American Civil Liberties Union did not agree with the Trump guidelines. From the NYT article:

...Omar Jadwat, the director of the American Civil Liberties Union’s immigrants’ rights project, said on Thursday the new guidelines troubled him, particularly as they could be read as creating arbitrary definitions of family relationships.

“Initial reports suggest that the government may try to unilaterally expand the scope of the ban — for example, by arbitrarily refusing to treat certain categories of familial relationships as ‘bona fide,’ ” he said. “These reports are deeply concerning.”

In other words, the Trump administration is looking for ways to undermine the Supre Court's order, which essentially allowed the majority of refugees and immigrants from Muslim countries to enter the US without problems. What the Trump guidelines do is to look for ways to not obey the Supreme Court's order.

The SC should declare the Trump administration in contempt of court for doing this. But it won't happen until somebody sues the Trump administration for the guidelines.