Loud Whispers

The US Justice Department files a new defence of the controversial executive order, which currently remains suspended.

A US federal appeals court will hear arguments over whether to reinstate Donald Trump’s travel ban later today.

In arguments filed yesterday evening, the Justice Department insisted the executive order was a “lawful exercise”.

Government lawyers said the President has clear authority to “suspend the entry of any class of aliens” in the name of national security.

The Justice Department’s brief also said that Judge James Robart’s suspension of immigration restrictions was too broad and it criticised Washington and Minnesota, the two states who launched the legal challenge against the executive order, for asking courts to “take the extraordinary step of second-guessing a formal national security judgment made by the President himself”.

A randomly selected panel of judges from the California-based 9th US Circuit Court of Appeals will hear the case.

If either side is unhappy with the outcome, a showdown in the Supreme Court may follow.

Lawyers representing Washington and Minnesota have warned that resuming the travel ban on migrants and visitors from seven Muslim-majority countries would “unleash chaos again” – separating families and leaving university students stranded.

Their case has also been buoyed by 10 former US officials – including secretaries of state and CIA directors who served under Republican and Democratic presidents – who filed a declaration in the case arguing that the travel ban served no national security purposes.

Mr Trump has continued to defend his executive order, saying: “Radical Islamic terrorists are determined to strike our homeland as they did on 9/11.

“We need strong programmes for people who love our country.”

Meanwhile, the President has accused the media of deliberately minimising coverage of the threat posed by Islamic State.

A bizarre list of 78 terror attacks has been released by the White House, with the administration claiming “most” of them did not get sufficient media attention.

Among the incidents included on the hastily written list was the Paris attacks of November 2015 and the San Bernardino shootings of December 2015, both of which received widespread attention and in-depth reporting.

Less high-profile incidents in which nobody was killed were also on the list.

White House spokesman Sean Spicer said: “Like a protest gets blown out of the water, and yet an attack or a foiled attack doesn’t necessarily get the same coverage.”