A federal appeals court has thrown out one of the remaining challenges to President Donald Trump's travel ban on several majority-Muslim countries, citing the U.S. Supreme Court's prior ruling upholding the policy.

District Judge Theodore Chuang of the District of Maryland last year refused to dismiss the constitutional claims in the lawsuit, as plaintiffs had presented "factual allegations sufficient to show that the proclamation [was] not rationally related to the legitimate national security and information-sharing justifications identified in the proclamation [but] … was motivated only by an illegitimate hostility to Muslims." He said the case could proceed to discovery on those claims, as the Supreme Court's holding in Hawaii v. Trump, which upheld the ban, was based on a record created at the preliminary injunction stage.

A three-judge panel on the Fourth Circuit on Monday reversed that finding, with Judge Paul Niemeyer writing in the opinion that the "district court misunderstood the import of the Supreme Court's decision in Hawaii and the legal principles it applied." Judges G. Steven Agee and Julius Richardson joined the opinion.