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Even more states have joined forces to fight Trump’s new travel ban

With only a few days until President Donald Trump’s revised travel ban is scheduled to take effect, several states officially leapt into the legal fight against it.

Massachusetts, New York, Oregon, California, and Maryland all joined papers filed Monday by Washington state challenging Trump’s new travel ban. Issued by Trump last week, the ban would forbid people from the majority-Muslim countries of Sudan, Syria, Somalia, Iran, Libya, and Yemen from entering the United States unless they already have a valid visa or green card. It’s set to go into effect on Thursday.

Under Trump’s original executive order, citizens of those countries and of Iraq were not allowed into the U.S. regardless of their immigration status. A January lawsuit filed by Washington state secured a nationwide halt to the original travel ban. Last week, Washington Attorney General Bob Ferguson asked a federal judge to extend the halt to the original ban to the second one. Minnesota and Oregon signed on to that request.

In both Thursday’s request and Monday’s amended filing, Ferguson argues that the new ban is so similar to the first that states don’t even need to file new lawsuits to declare it unconstitutional.

“Once a court issues a restraining order, you can’t get around that by somebody saying, ‘Oh we’ve issued something new, changed a few words, and now the court, you don’t have a restraining order anymore,’” Ferguson said shortly before he filed the request last week. “That’s just common sense.”

Hawaii has also filed an amended lawsuit against Trump’s ban; its original challenge was put on hold after Trump released the revised version.