By Jaweed Kaleem, Melissa Etehad and Laura King

Tribune Washington Bureau

Advocates for immigrants Monday condemned the latest incarnation of President Donald Trump’s travel ban, calling it an abuse of presidential authority and potentially unconstitutional, as they vowed to continue fighting the president’s travel restrictions.

The new measure, which takes effect Oct. 18 and will apply indefinitely, bans entry by most citizens of Syria, Libya, Iran, Yemen, Somalia, Chad and North Korea. It also imposes restrictions on a small number of citizens of Iraq and Venezuela.

Sudan, whose nationals were previously blocked from coming to the U.S. under a prior temporary ban that expired Sunday, has been dropped off the list. Chad, Venezuela and North Korea are new entries.

The National Iranian American Council, decrying the open-ended nature of the directive, said the administration “has now taken steps to make its Muslim ban … permanent.” The new measure, it said in a statement, was “nothing but an extension of the same discriminatory policy first rolled out in January.”

The White House order, which cites national security concerns and a global review of vetting procedures for entry to the U.S., calls for an indefinite ban on almost all travel to the U.S. by nationals of the seven countries, which include most that were targeted in Trump’s initial ban issued after he took office.

The original order, which also included a 120-day halt to all refugee admissions, was blocked in federal courts and revised, and then was blocked again. The Supreme Court is scheduled to hear arguments over that travel ban on Oct. 10. It’s unclear how the newly revised ban affects that case. On Sunday, the Department of Justice on asked justices to order both sides to submit briefs on the new ban.

But while federal district court and appellate judges across the country derided the first two travel bans as violating the Constitution and immigration law, legal experts said Trump’s new measure would be harder to defeat.

Federal courts would be “more likely to hold that this version of the travel ban is legal,” said Stephen Yale-Loehr, an immigration attorney and law professor at Cornell University. Yale-Loehr said the new ban addressed some of the successful legal challenges that brought down prior versions.

“The proclamation goes into depth about how the administration conducted its survey of other countries’ identity management and information-sharing protocols. The proclamation bars only certain people from certain countries, not everyone from a given country. The proclamation includes North Korea and Venezuela, two non-Muslim-majority countries. And the new travel ban does not bar refugees from entering the United States,” he said.

Opponents who have long argued that the ban is a fulfillment of the president’s campaign promise to stop all Muslim immigration into the U.S. said they would continue to challenge the travel restrictions as anti-Muslim.

“This is still a Muslim ban _ they simply added three additional countries,” said Becca Heller, director of the International Refugee Assistance Project, in a statement. The group is among those scheduled to argue against the ban in the Supreme Court. “Of those countries, Chad is majority Muslim, travel from North Korea is already basically frozen and the restrictions on Venezuela only affect government officials on certain visas. You can’t get any more transparent than that,” Heller said.

The National Immigration Law Center, another litigant in the Supreme Court case, tweeted on Sunday that “the original intent behind this always was an attempt to ban Muslims.”

“Inflicting even more harm will do nothing to change the discriminatory intent behind this,” the organization wrote in another tweet. “It will simply cause more harm. #NoMuslimBanEver.”