Just a few short weeks ago, the 9th Circuit Court in San Fransisco refused to overturn a lower court decision that halted the implementation of President Trump’s Executive Order that would temporarily halt immigration from seven countries until “extreme vetting” procedures had been established.
One of the reasons the judges cited was the hardships the travel restriction would cause and applied 5th Amendment protections to non-citizens. Here’s is a snippet from Professor Jacobson’s review as a reminder.
The 9th Circuit failed to distinguish between people even the government concedes have some due process rights and as to whom it would not apply the Executive Order (e.g., permanent residents, those lawfully in the U.S. on a visa) and strangers abroad who may not even have applied for a visa. By failing, indeed refusing, to distinguish among those very different categories, the 9th Circuit effectively extends constitutional due process protections even to people who have not yet even applied for a visa.
Yet, the state of California is happily imposing travel restrictions on its own citizens in the name of political correctness. A new Golden State statute prohibits state agencies (including state universities) from funding travel to a number of states that have laws that allegedly discriminate against the LGBT community, but now students looking to attend conferences in those states have to pay their own way or not go at all.
On January first of this year, Assembly Bill 1887 went into effect, which reads in part:
…. “[T]he Board of Regents of the University of California … shall not … Approve a request for state-funded or state-sponsored travel to a state that, after June 26, 2015, has enacted a law that voids or repeals, or has the effect of voiding or repealing, existing state or local protections against discrimination on the basis of sexual orientation.
The states that have been targeted for the travel ban are:
Now, the effect of that ban is being felt by California’s students:
UC Davis senior Acacia Keith was excited to present her research on the anti-abortion movement at what would have been her first national conference this spring.The Council on Undergraduate Research conference, which showcases work by more than 3,000 undergraduates, is considered a premier opportunity to make an academic mark and network for jobs and graduate programs. UC Davis was going to pay for Keith to travel there.But there’s a problem. The conference is being held this year at the University of Memphis in Tennessee. A new California law bans state-funded travel to states that discriminate against the LGBT community. And the California attorney general has listed Tennessee as one of them, along with Kansas, North Carolina and Mississippi.At least 18 students at UC Davis, UC Santa Barbara and Cal State Long Beach planned to attend the Memphis conference with their trips paid by the state schools. More than 100 Californians were selected for the April gathering, but Elizabeth Ambos, the council’s executive director, could not say how many attended public universities that are subject to the law.
The California Golden Bears, the UC Berkeley college basketball team, had to nix a series it was planning with the University of Kansas.
Cal has ended talks with the Kansas Jayhawks about a potential future home-and-home series because of an anti-discrimination law passed in California in 2015, according to a report.According to the Lawrence World-Journal, the law, which took effect Jan. 1, does not allow public colleges or universities to visit teams in other states that have laws that allow discrimination against the LGBT community. Kansas has a “religious freedom” law that allows student groups to be discriminatory in their membership practices based on those groups’ beliefs, the World-Journal reported.”Cal said they couldn’t do it,” Kansas athletics spokesman Jim Marchiony told the World-Journal of the proposed series with the Golden Bears.
These incidents won’t be the last social justice travel bans that will impact students at California’s public institutions.
Too bad our California students, many of whom pay a considerable amount of tuition to attend those insitutions, don’t enjoy protections on the type of travel they can do in the quest for a quality education.
Perhaps some savvy lawyer can bring this issue to the attention of the 9th Circuit Court? Its decision on this matter would be…fascinating.
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