US ‘immigration’ ban is blocked. What’s next?

A federal judge in California has struck down President Donald Trump’s executive order barring many types of visa entrants into the US. As a reminder, Trump issued this order in June because of the supposed threat foreign workers pose to native-born employment during the Covid-19 pandemic.
The decision flatly contradicts a different ruling last month by a different federal district court judge in Washington. Both cases will now go to the respective courts of appeals. If those courts also disagree, and if Trump is re-elected and doesn’t retract the executive order, the issue could eventually make its way to the Supreme Court.
Which judge is right? The answer depends on how you read the 2018 Trump v. Hawaii case in which the Supreme Court upheld the 3.0 version of Trump’s Muslim travel ban.
The California federal court read the travel ban case narrowly and struck down the Covid-era order as beyond the president’s power and as insufficiently reasoned. The DC federal court read the travel ban case broadly and upheld the Covid-era order on the theory that federal
law basically lets the president do whatever he wants with regard to
immigration.
The alternative would be to give the president nearly carte blanche over immigration matters. That result would not sit well either with the court’s liberals or with all of its conservatives. Justice Neil Gorsuch, for example, doesn’t think Congress can just delegate all its power to the president. The swing vote would probably lie with Chief Justice John Roberts, who wrote the Trump v. Hawaii decision and would probably want to limit it. That ruling has worn poorly, especially when viewed against the backdrop of Trump’s systematic disdain for the rule of law.
The executive order in this case, presidential proclamation 10052, reflects White House adviser Stephen Miller’s extreme anti-immigration stance. It immediately suspended all H1-B, H2-B, J and L visas, which covered occupations from high-skilled tech employees to au pairs.
The statutory basis for the president to claim this unilateral authority was Section 1182(f) of the Immigration and Naturalization Act — the exact same provision at issue in the Muslim travel ban case. It says that the president may suspend visas “whenever the president finds that the entry of any aliens or class of aliens in the United States would be detrimental to the interests of the United States.”
That “whenever” is pretty broad language. Roberts, writing in the Trump v. Hawaii case, said it “exudes deference” to the president. That’s the reason the federal judge in Washington, thought the Covid-era order was within the president’s authority as conferred by Congress.
The federal judge in California argued that courts should show the president less deference when the issue isn’t national security, as it supposedly was in the Muslim travel ban case, but domestic policy. He went on to say that, if the statute let the president unilaterally change immigration policy based on purely domestic considerations, that would give him “monarchical power” over immigration.
The idea that the president is not a king is perhaps the most significant constitutional leitmotif of judicial decisions in the Trump presidency — not to mention being a crucial element of the impeachment case against Trump. In this context, it means that the courts should not assume that Congress meant to hand over the entirety of immigration policy to the president.

—Bloomberg