President Trump says his proposed freeze on admission of anyone from six overwhelmingly Muslim nations, and on all U.S. admissions of refugees, is urgently needed to protect Americans from incoming terrorists. But since federal courts blocked his order last week, the Justice Department has shown no sign of any pressing need for action.

Trump’s current executive order — issued a month after federal courts halted enforcement of an earlier, broader version — was scheduled to take effect Thursday, but was blocked hours earlier by a federal judge in Hawaii as an apparent act of religious discrimination. A federal judge in Maryland issued a similar ruling early Thursday, limited to the six-nation ban.

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But Trump shouldn’t take Gorsuch’s vote for granted, said Pamela Karlan, a Stanford law professor and former Justice Department attorney in President Barack Obama’s administration.

“If it were almost any other president, my guess is, somebody who took the positions that Neil Gorsuch took when he was in the (Bush) administration would likely be deferential to presidential power” on issues of immigration and national security, Karlan said.

“But when you have a president who has said as many times as he (Trump) has, ‘I just want to ban all Muslims from the country,’ it’s hard for judges not to look behind that.”