In a recent Justia blog post, Illinois Law dean and professor Vikram David Amar and co-author Alan E. Brownstein (UC-Davis) consider the difficulties of analyzing the Trump administration's motives for the executive orders on immigration.

"One of the vexing legal questions raised by President Trump’s original and revised executive orders concerning entry into the United States by nationals of several Middle Eastern and African countries is whether and how courts ought to take into account the subjective motives behind the executive order, whether or not these motives are reflected in the text of the orders themselves.

"Many people think of the executive orders as 'Muslim bans'—even though there is no mention of Muslim peoples in the orders themselves—because they credit rhetoric prior to the executive orders that may tend to suggest anti-Muslim sentiment has been on the president’s mind as he has crafted these entry limitations. (For these purposes critics are asserting that a desire to exclude persons from one religious group would be impermissible, although in the immigration setting that proposition might be a contested question.)"

Read the full post at verdict.justia.com.