The Supreme Court rejected Korematsu logic while upholding the identical Muslim ban reasoning.

Evidence

Trump legal advisor (and former New York City mayor) Rudy Giuliani attempted to provide a legal cover for the ban; he argued that it was not a ban at all and that Muslims were not being targeted specifically because they were Muslim. According to Giuliani, “we focused on, instead of religion, danger—the areas of the world that create danger for us, which is a factual basis, not a religious basis. Perfectly legal, perfectly sensible.” Indeed, such logic has been deployed for decades. Thus, the Supreme Court upheld the final iteration in 2018 on these grounds, arguing that the president of the United States could limit entry to those seen as security threats. The Court also struck down the 1944 Korematsu case that upheld Japanese internment which was based on the notion that people of Japanese descent constituted a race that represented a threat to the United States. Yet they refused to apply the same logic to the Muslim ban. In the minority opinion, Judge Sotomayor argued that the two were the same and that discrimination was a work based on “a superficial claim of national security.” While she did not use the term race, Naber and Rana appropriately noted that “the racism of Japanese internment is the racism of the Muslim travel ban. Racism based on nationality is the racism based on religious group.” — Deepa Kumar, Islamophobia and the Politics of Empire, 640

Categorization

Category: Contrarian or Surprising Claims

• XREF: Connects to the earlier claim that NSEERS registry plans drew explicitly on Japanese internment precedent; shows the court actively refusing its own logic.
• QUESTION: Worth checking whether the Court’s actual 2018 majority opinion engaged the Korematsu parallel at length or dismissed it quickly — useful for a comparative piece on legal colorblind racism.

Related

• Colorblind national-security pretexts let courts uphold racial bans they reject elsewhere (similarity 0.86)

Broader Connections

• The Court overturned Korematsu but upheld the strikingly similar Muslim ban #corroborates (1.00)
• The Muslim ban’s security rationale repeats the logic the Court rejected in Korematsu. #corroborates (0.95)