SAN FRANCISCO (AP) — President Donald Trump's administration says it does not want a larger appellate panel to review a ruling keeping its travel ban on hold and will instead revise the ban.
The administration said in a court filing on Thursday that it will replace the travel ban with a new one in the near future.
President Trump had indicated Friday that he would push new measures this week.
If the travel ban is redrafted, more care would be needed to avoid more blocks from courts.
A U.S. appeals court on Feb. 9 refused to reinstate Trump's ban on travelers from seven Muslim-majority nations.
Three federal judges unanimously rejected the Justice Department's arguments that the president's authority on immigration policy is his discretion alone, with no authority for review by the courts.
The panel from the 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals said there's no precedent to support that notion, which "runs contrary to the fundamental structure of our constitutional democracy.''
The judges noted that Washington state and Minnesota had raised serious allegations about religious discrimination in President Donald Trump's ban on seven predominantly Muslim countries.
Trump originally indicated that the Justice Department would appeal the decision to the Supreme Court.
Trump's order, which he signed Jan. 27, had banned entry to the United States by residents of seven Muslim-majority countries — Iraq, Syria, Iran, Libya, Somalia, Sudan, and Yemen — for 90 days.
The executive order had also banned U.S. entry of those fleeing war-torn Syria indefinitely, and had banned the admission of all refugees for the next four months.
The appeals court countered that no one from the countries committed a terror attack in the United States.
In a 29-page decision, they write: "the Government has not offered any evidence or even an explanation of how the national security concerns that justified those designations, which triggered visa requirements, can be extrapolated to justify an urgent need for the Executive Order to be immediately reinstated."
Opponents of the ban had said the ban unconstitutionally discriminated against Muslims.
The court decided to put aside consideration of that hot-button issue.
Instead, they ruled that travelers — even non-American citizens — were denied due process before travel, like a hearing.