Thank God that at least part of the government is functioning as it ought to. On Thursday, a three-judge panel of the 9th Circuit Court of Appeals upheld a temporary freeze on the president’s misguided ban on travel from seven mostly Muslim countries and his suspension of refugee resettlements.

Ostensibly, President Trump wants to suspend the refugee program and freeze immigration from the seven countries in order to give his administration time to review how the government vets visa and asylum requests. It would be foolish not to assess how such programs are working on a regular basis – that’s basic governmental accountability.

But absent evidence that the nation faces heightened risk under the current system, it should continue letting people who qualify for visas receive them, and provide asylum for refugees who deserve it. That the nation has not suffered a fatal terror attack by an immigrant from those seven countries since the vetting processes were tightened after 9/11 puts the lie to Trump’s panicky assertion that we face a great and imminent peril. Further, as the Cato Institute reported, only 20 of 154 people identified as foreign-born terrorists between 1975 and 2015 came from among the 3.3 million refugees settled here during that time. Those individuals caused the deaths of three victims; although any murder is to be decried, those statistics hardly support the level of alarm we see from our anguished president.

Read more at The Boulder Daily Camera.