Lawyers help me out - if the law gives the POTUS the sole responsibility to end or limit immigration as he sees fit, how does the court, any court, have any standing in this?
Don't take my comments as a defense of the court's ruling. I read it, and it's one of the most politicized, lawless, horse **** court decisions I've ever read in my life. Nevertheless, here's how it reached its decision. First, it had to find that the parties challenging the Order had standing to sue. I think its rationale was pretty questionable on that, but that wasn't your question.
Second, to answer your question regarding the Immigration and Nationality Act, which grants the President the power to ban whoever he wants, however long he wants, for whatever reason he wants, the court simply didn't address that issue at all. It instead went to a First Amendment analysis and found that the ban discriminated on the basis of religion, even though the Order was actually religiously neutral. It sorta inferred Trump's intentions from his past statements against Muslims and his previous call for a Muslim ban to find that the Order was intended to discriminate against Muslims regardless of what it actually said and summarily (and with no meaningful analysis) found that the national security basis for it was pretext.
I've got lots of issues with the case. First, I don't buy the standing arguments presented by the State of Hawaii or by the Imam whose mother-in-law was denied entry. If they have standing, then some state or some individual would have standing to sue every single time a human being is denied entry into the United States. That's completely farcical and idiotic. The people who would have standing to challenge the order are those denied entry - nobody else.
Second, by the court's own language, the Order applies to "nationals of these six countries who (1) are outside the United States on the new Executive Order’s effective date of March 16, 2017; (2) do not have a valid visa on that date, and (3) did not have a valid visa as of 5:00 p.m. Eastern Standard Time on January 27, 2017." In other words, it applies to people who have no legal connection whatsoever to the United States. They aren't citizens, legal residents of any kind, or visa holders, or to put it more bluntly, they are people who have NO FRIGGIN' right to enter the United States at all.
Third, the Order didn't discriminate on the basis of religion. It discriminated on the basis of national origin, which we have ALWAYS had the right to do. For the court to take past statements by the President (as stupid as they were) and elevate them OVER the words in the Order is a complete mockery of the very concept of jurisprudence. Rule #1 of applying a law is to start with what it says. We're not even doing that with this order. It's an example of blatant judicial activism to the extreme. I couldn't help but think about the Supreme Court's ruling on finding the individual mandate from Obamacare to be constitutional because it was a tax, despite its authors' and President Obama's characterizations of it (which were that it wasn't a tax). Its rationale was basically that you should look at what the law actually does, not what its authors say it does. Well, this hack of a judge in Hawaii did the complete opposite.