President Donald Trump said on Thursday he will issue a new executive order to replace his controversial directive suspending travel to the United States by citizens of seven mostly Muslim countries.

At a White House news conference, Trump said the new order would seek to address concerns raised by federal appeals court judges, who temporarily blocked his original travel ban.

"The new order is going to be very much tailored to what I consider to be a very bad decision," Trump said, adding: "We had a bad court."

Trump gave no details about the replacement order. Legal experts said a new directive would have a better chance of withstanding courtroom scrutiny.

The original order, issued on Jan 27, triggered chaos at some US and overseas airports, led to international protests, complaints from US businesses and more than a dozen legal challenges.

The ban has been deeply divisive, with about half of US citizens supporting it shortly after the order took effect.

Meanwhile, businesses shut their doors, students skipped classes and thousands of demonstrators took to the streets in cities across the country on Thursday to protest Trump's immigration policies.

Activists staged "A Day Without Immigrants" to highlight the importance of the foreign-born, who account for 13 percent of the US population, or 40 million naturalized citizens.

Trump campaigned against the estimated 12 million illegal immigrants, playing on fears of violent crime while promising to build a wall on the US-Mexico border.

While the number of protesters could not be determined, many sympathetic business owners closed shop and working-class immigrants gave up their pay for a day.

"I told my English teacher that I wasn't going to school, and she said she understood," said Rosa Castro, a 13-year-old in Detroit, who marched with her 26-year-old sister, one of several undocumented family members whose future she is concerned about.