Yesterday in the Hawaii travel ban case, District Judge Derrick Watson denied the Plaintiffs' Emergency Motion to Clarify Scope of Preliminary Injunction.
Upon careful consideration of the parties' submissions, it is evident that the parties quarrel over the meaning and intent of words and phrases authored not by this Court, but by the Supreme Court in its June 26, 2017 per curiam decision. That is, the parties' disagreements derive neither from this Court's temporary restraining order, this Court's preliminary injunction, nor this Court's amended preliminary injunction, but from the modifications to this Court's injunction ordered by the Supreme Court. Accordingly, the clarification to the modifications that the parties seek should be more appropriately sought in the Supreme Court.Ariane de Vogue has this article for CNN. The full text of the order is here.
Seems to me that the "family member" piece needs to tie to traditional notions of where, by virtue of the relationship, rights generally accrue. Thus a husband with a wife in the US would be covered, but a mother of a non-disabled adult child in the US would not.
The Supreme Court said, "a close familial relationship is required." What is "close"? The logical place to look, it seems to me, is the set of relationships that Congress has deemed close enough for family-based immigrant visas.
The problem with adopting that set is that the court said in the case at hand that a mother-in-law was close enough, and that is not close enough for a family immigrant petition.