President Trump says his executive order blocking immigrants from seven predominantly Muslim countries is about national security.
Before issuing his ruling Friday suspending the ban, U.S. District Court Judge James Robart said there was no rational basis for the argument that immigrants admitted to the U.S. from Iran, Iraq, Libya, Somalia, Sudan, Syria and Yemen posed a threat.
“You’re here arguing on behalf of someone who says we have to protect the United States from these individuals coming from these countries and there is no support for that,” the judge told a lawyer for the Justice Department.
A recent study by the New America Foundation, a nonpartisan think tank in Washington, doesn't help Trump's case.
It identified all 10 terrorist attacks in the U.S. since Sept. 11, 2001, that were carried out by radicalized followers of Islam. There were 12 perpetrators.
All were either Americans citizens or in the country legally. Here's where they were born:
United States: 7
Russia: 1
Kyrgyzstan: 1
Egypt: 1
Kuwait: 1
Pakistan: 1
One man was responsible for 49 of the 94 total deaths in those attacks: Omar Mateen, who gunned down patrons at an Orlando, Fla., night club last June. He was born in New York to Afghan parents.
The second biggest death toll came in December 2015, when Tashfeen Malik, a Pakistani woman, and her husband, Syed Rizwan Farook, who was born in the United States, killed 14 people at a holiday party in San Bernardino.