Hawaii Challenges Trump's Rollout of Travel Ban in Court

(Bloomberg) -- Hawaii asked a court to clarify the scope of President Donald Trump’s travel ban, saying the government’s latest restrictions go further than the U.S. Supreme Court allowed.

The Supreme Court on Monday allowed Trump to implement his legally-fraught ban on travel from six Muslim-majority nations, but the justices exempted travelers with "bona fide" ties to the U.S. They left it to the administration to define those ties, and it did so Wednesday.

Hawaii, which brought one of the previous legal challenges that stalled the president’s March executive order, now is taking issue with how the government is defining family ties in the implementation of the ban scheduled to take effect at 8 p.m. in Washington.

“A few hours ago, after days of stonewalling plaintiffs’ repeated requests for information, the government announced that it intended to violate the Supreme Court’s instruction,” Hawaii said in a filing Thursday in Honolulu federal court. “It will apply the executive order to exclude a host of aliens with a ‘close familial relationship” to U.S. persons, including grandparents and grandchildren, brothers- and sisters-in-law, fiancés, aunts, uncles, nieces, nephews and cousins.”

Hawaii submitted its emergency request for clarification to the same judge, Derrick Watson, who previously blocked Trump’s March executive order from taking effect.

The state’s attorney general, Doug Chin, said if the judge can’t immediately provide clarification, the state wants an order barring the government from using the State Department’s definition of family ties.

“Our concern is that when you read their definition of what constitutes a close family relationship, they’re cutting out a lot of people,” Chin said in a statement.

To contact the reporter on this story: Kartikay Mehrotra in San Francisco at kmehrotra2@bloomberg.net.

To contact the editors responsible for this story: Elizabeth Wollman at ewollman@bloomberg.net, Peter Blumberg