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news analysis
The addition of visa overstays as a rationale could provide an opening for new legal challenges, migrant advocates say.
Charlie Savage writes about national security and legal policy. He reported from Washington.
June 5, 2025, 7:21 p.m. ET
President Trump’s new travel ban appears devised to avoid legal flaws that slowed early versions in his first term. But the new order adds an innovation — banning countries with visitors who frequently overstay their visas — that could be a fresh basis for a challenge, immigration legal experts said.
During his first term, Mr. Trump enacted a series of bans that shut the borders to citizens of various countries he deemed problematic, spurring a fierce fight over the moves. Courts blocked his first two attempts at a travel ban, but in 2018, the Supreme Court allowed his third, more carefully drafted, order to take effect.
That order went away not because of a court ruling, but because President Joseph R. Biden Jr. rescinded it in January 2021, after he took office. Mr. Trump’s new order, issued late Wednesday, mainly builds on the structure and rationale of the version that survived Supreme Court review last time.
On Thursday, a range of immigration legal advocates said they were still studying its details to assess whether there was sufficient footing for a lawsuit.
“It’s a different ban, using lessons they learned from challenges to the first, second and third travel ban about how to justify one,” said Shev Dalal-Dheini of the American Immigration Lawyers Association. “They took steps to try to protect against litigation.”
That said, she added, “I don’t think it’s foolproof.”
The countries Mr. Trump targeted were primarily in Africa and the Middle East. Many of them were selected based on a similar rationale that the Supreme Court upheld in Mr. Trump’s first term: Their governments are either dysfunctional or hostile and uncooperative, impeding steps like security vetting.
