The Trump administration said it is against allowing travel to the U.S. for grandparents from six majority-Muslim countries whose grandchildren are U.S. citizens.
The Supreme Court issued a ruling that allowed some of the president's travel ban order to go into effect, but cannot apply to anyone with a "bona fide relationship with a U.S. citizen or U.S. entity."
After the ruling, the government said "bona fide" means close relatives such as parents, spouses, siblings, and children, according to Reuters. Grandparents, grandchildren, aunts, uncles, nieces, nephews, and cousins are banned under the order
On Monday, the Justice Department argued the order "hews closely" to the Immigration and Nationality Act, a 1965 act that ranks family relationships for immigration policy reasons, NPR reports.
Yeganeh Torbati, a Reuters reporter that covers the State Department, questioned the exclusion of grandparents, according to NPR.
"The stated rationale was to increase security in the United States by creating another barrier to potential terrorists… If that is the stated purpose of this ban, what logic does the grandparent exclusion play in this?
"I asked in the State Department briefing, what percentage of terrorist attacks have been carried out by grandparents from these six countries? We didn't get a straight answer," Torbati told NPR.
Organizations that help refugees said their work allows refugees to be qualified as having a "bona fide relationship" with a U.S. entity, but the Justice Department disagreed, Reuters reported.
"A refugee's relationship with the agency flows from the government, not from an independent relationship between the refugee and the resettlement agency. Indeed, resettlement agencies typically do not have any direct contact with the refugees they assure before their arrival in the United States," the government said, according to Reuters.
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