A US judge has temporarily halted President Donald Trump’s executive order to ban WeChat, a Chinese messaging, social media, and mobile payment app.
The ban was slated to go into effect Sunday night, reports Xinhua news agency.
Magistrate Judge Laurel Beeler in San Francisco issued the order earlier on Sunday granting a motion for a preliminary injunction, which determined the restrictions placed on WeChat could violate the Constitutional Amendment rights of its users in the US.
“The result is that consumers in the US cannot download or update the WeChat app, use it to send or receive money, and because US support for the app by data hosting and content caching will be eliminated, the app, while perhaps technically available to existing US users, likely will be useless to them,” Judge Beeler wrote in her order.
The order came after three days of consecutive hearings.
The plaintiffs, including the US WeChat Users Alliance (USWUA) and other app users, argued that WeChat is irreplaceable for its users in the US, particularly in the Chinese-speaking and Chinese-American community.
On August 6, Trump issued an executive order banning US transactions via WeChat.
To fight for the legal rights of all WeChat users in the country, USWUA, an NGO, sued the Trump administration for the ban.
The lawsuit opened in court on September 17.
On Friday, the Commerce Department issued the Identification of Prohibited Transactions.
