TAMPA, Fla. — President Donald Trump’s travel ban that took effect at 12:01 a.m. on Monday morning will likely hold up in court better than the ban that was enacted in the president’s first term, according to a legal expert.

Louis Virelli, law professor at Stetson University, says the ban will see some type of legal challenges.

“The challenges will likely be that he’s targeting a particular set of religious beliefs or ethnicities or races,” Virelli said. “That’s going to be hard to prove.”

During the first Trump administration, the order which was at the time sometimes referred to as a “Muslim ban,” was reworked twice until the latest version was upheld by the Supreme Court in 2018. Virelli says the ban initially lost in the Supreme Court because it looked to be religiously discriminatory.

Virelli says that is not true of this list, which has a more diverse set of countries in terms of religion, ethnicity and race. Any challenge, he says, would have to be based on protected discriminatory criteria.

“The inclusion of countries like Chad and Venezuela sort of dilute the religious objection to this ban and in some ways the ethic and racial objections,” he explained. “So we’re going to have to see how the challengers frame their complaints.”

The 2025 ban includes Afghanistan, Chad, the Republic of Congo, Equatorial Guinea, Eritrea, Haiti, Iran, Libya, Myanmar, Somalia, Sudan and Yemen. There are also heightened restrictions on visitors from Burundi, Cuba, Laos, Sierra Leone, Togo, Turkmenistan and Venezuela.

None of the 12 countries included in the ban have direct flights to Tampa.

Southwest and World Atlantic offer nonstop flights from Havana, Cuba.