Famed civil-rights attorney Alan Dershowitz predicted Tuesday a federal appeals court would not overturn the nationwide ban issued last week on President Donald Trump's executive order affecting travelers from seven majority-Muslim countries because doing so would "create chaos."
"The key issue here is the very narrow one," the Harvard Law School professor emeritus told Erin Burnett on CNN. "Are they going to now say that we withdraw the Washington state injunction and create chaos at the airport, not telling people whether they can stay or go, before we decide this issue?"
"When the United States government decided to act and say to the people coming into the country and to the airport people, act as if this order had never been issued, they sealed their fate," he added. "It was over.
"No court is going to overturn that and create chaos.
"I will bet you anything that this court is going to uphold that injunction," Dershowitz said. "How do they decide on the merits? How they decide on the merits, I don't know.
"But no court — conservative, liberal, Democrat — is going to throw it back and say, 'chaos, chaos.' That's not how they behave."
A three-judge panel of the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals in San Francisco held a hearing on an appeal brought Saturday by the Trump administration seeking to reinstate the travel ban that affected the countries: Iran, Iraq, Libya, Somalia, Sudan, Syria, and Yemen.
The hearing marked the greatest legal challenge yet to the ban, which has upended travel to the United States for more than a week and tested the new administration's use of executive power.
U.S. District Court Judge James Robart issued the national temporary restraining order last Friday. Trump signed the order Jan. 27.
The White House argued Tuesday that President Trump alone had the power to decide who could enter or stay in the United States.
But several states, including Washington and Minnesota, have fought the ban on travelers from the nations — insisting it was unconstitutional.
Washington Solicitor General Noah Purcell told the judges the order had harmed state residents by splitting up families, holding up students trying to travel to study and preventing people from visiting family abroad.
Dershowitz told Burnett he believed the administration, represented by Justice Department lawyer August Flentje, "was not well represented on this appeal.
"The lawyer for the government did not have answers to the hard questions," he said. "He could have made a much, much more compelling argument.
"He didn't begin well — and he didn't really focus on what the court's concerns were."
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