SEATTLE _ Washington state is asking a federal judge to block President Donald Trump's revised travel ban.
Washington was the first state to sue over the original travel ban, which resulted in a federal judge in Seattle halting its implementation around the country.
State Attorney General Bob Ferguson on Thursday said the state would ask the judge to extend his temporary restraining order against the first ban to Trump's revised order.
The new ban is scheduled to go into effect March 16 and bars new visas for people from six predominantly Muslim countries and temporarily shuts down the U.S. refugee program.
Ferguson's lawsuit against the first version of Trump's travel ban halted that executive order, and the Trump administration ended up withdrawing it and replacing it with the limited one.
"I do not take lightly suing the president of the United States," Ferguson said Monday, when the new version of the travel ban was announced. He called the original executive order "illegal and unconstitutional."
In the new executive order, the Trump administration removed several key provisions from the original version, including bans on green-card holders, visa holders and dual citizens, and a preference for religious minorities in the Muslim nations.
The first executive order applied to citizens of Iran, Iraq, Libya, Somalia, Sudan, Syria and Yemen. The new order applies to those same countries except for Iraq, which has been removed.
Local experts in immigration law said that the narrower travel ban avoids some of the legal issues that brought down the first one, but could still prove vulnerable to court challenges.
Hawaii, on Tuesday, filed the first legal challenge against the new executive order.
