White House: Court ruling 'does not undercut' Trump order

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last updated 30 January 2017

A White House official said Sunday that the multiple court rulings limiting enforcement of President Trump's executive order on immigration and refugee admissions do not defeat the order as a whole.

The statement was similar to comments made by White House counselor Kellyanne Conway in an interview on Fox News Sunday, in which she distinguished between enforcement of the order against travelers who already obtained legitimate visas before the order was signed (the specific province of the rulings) and those applying for U.S. entrance after the order was signed. The rulings do not "affect the executive order at all," Conway said, "because the executive order is going to be prospective — it's preventing, not detaining."

However, some reports suggest Customs and Border Patrol agents may be defying the judges' orders on direction of the White House.

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Bonnie Kristian was a deputy editor and acting editor-in-chief of TheWeek.com. She is a columnist at Christianity Today and author of Untrustworthy: The Knowledge Crisis Breaking Our Brains, Polluting Our Politics, and Corrupting Christian Community (forthcoming 2022) and A Flexible Faith: Rethinking What It Means to Follow Jesus Today (2018). Her writing has also appeared at Time Magazine, CNN, USA Today, Newsweek, the Los Angeles Times, and The American Conservative, among other outlets.