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    Trump’s new travel ban is a gratuitously cruel sequel | Moustafa Bayoumi

    I’m not much for horror movies, but I have just read that the film Black Phone 2 “will creep into cinemas” in October and that, compared to the original, it’s supposed to be a “more violent, scarier, more graphic” film. I’ll pass on the movie, but that description seems pretty apt to what living under this Trump administration feels like: a gratuitously more violent sequel to a ghoulish original.Consider the Muslim ban. Back in late 2015, candidate Donald Trump called for “a total and complete shutdown of Muslims entering the United States until our country’s representatives can figure out what is going on”. He signed the first version of the Muslim ban on 27 January 2017, and protests erupted at airports across the nation at the revival of a national policy, similar to the Chinese Exclusion Act, that bars entry of whole swaths of people based on our national prejudices. It took the Trump administration three attempts at crafting this policy before the supreme court tragically greenlit it.While Joe Biden later reversed the policy, congressional moves to restrict the president’s ability to institute these blanket bans – such as the No Ban Act – have not succeeded. And on the first day of his second term, Trump indicated he was prepared to institute a wider-reaching travel ban. He has now done just that. The new executive order will “fully restrict and limit the entry [to the US] of nationals of the following 12 countries: Afghanistan, Burma, Chad, Republic of the Congo, Equatorial Guinea, Eritrea, Haiti, Iran, Libya, Somalia, Sudan, and Yemen” and will also “partially restrict and limit the entry of nationals of the following 7 countries: Burundi, Cuba, Laos, Sierra Leone, Togo, Turkmenistan, and Venezuela”.Yes, there are key cutouts in the latest travel ban that make it a different animal from the original 2017 ban, but it still derives from the same family. Green-card holders, those with valid visas issued before the executive order was proclaimed, and professional athletes representing their countries in the forthcoming World Cup, for example, are exempt, illustrating how the administration has learned to write more litigation-resistant immigration exclusion orders.But make no mistake. Such a policy is alienating, counterproductive and simply racist. For one thing, Trump claims that the ban is necessary because the selected countries exhibit either “a significant terrorist presence”, a lack of cooperation in accepting back their nationals, or high rates of visa overstays. According to the Entry/Exit Overstay Report for fiscal year 2023 (the last one available), the number of people from Equatorial Guinea, a small African country, who overstayed their B1/B2 visas (travel to the US for business or pleasure) was 200. From the United Kingdom, it was 15,712.It’s true that the percentage (as opposed to the number) of people overstaying their visas from Equatorial Guinea is significantly higher than UK overstays. But Djibouti, which hosts the primary US military base in for operations in Africa, has an even higher percentage of B1/B2 visa overstayers than Equatorial Guinea – yet it isn’t part of the ban, illustrating how much it is based on narrow political calculations and cheap theatrics.The capriciousness of the policy was immediately evident after Trump released a video explaining his decision. “The recent terror attack in Boulder, Colorado, has underscored the extreme dangers posed for our country by the entry of foreign nationals who are not properly vetted, as well as those who come here as temporary visitors and overstayed their visas,” he said, adding: “We don’t want them.” Yet, as everyone knows, the suspect in the Boulder, Colorado, attack is an Egyptian national, another key US ally. And Egypt is not on the list.Nor should it be, because these lists of banned countries collapse individuals into vague categories of suspicion and malfeasance. Why should the actions of one person from any given country mark a completely different person as inadmissible? Trump may sound tough to his supporters when announcing the ban, but such broad-brush applications against basically all the nationals of comparatively powerless countries is hardly the flex that Trump thinks it is. In the eyes of the rest of the world, the new policy mostly makes the administration look like a bully, picking on a handful of Muslim-majority countries, a few African and Asian states, a couple of its traditional enemies, and Haiti.Meanwhile, the rest of the world also sees how the Trump administration has withdrawn temporary protections from more than 500,000 people from Cuba, Haiti, Venezuela and Nicaragua, suspended refugee resettlement from around the world, and yet welcomed in dozens of white Afrikaners from South Africa to the United States as refugees. The ethnocentrism of the policy is as naked as it is opportunistic.The truth is that the damage from Trump’s first-term Muslim ban was long-lasting and had all kinds of collateral impact, including on the mental health of family members living in the United States. And immigrant advocacy organizations are already sharply criticizing this latest version. AfghanEvac, a non-profit organization that facilitates the resettlement of Afghans who worked with American troops, stated that the new ban “is not about national security – it is about political theater”. To include Afghanistan among the banned countries, even as thousands of Afghans worked alongside American forces, is to Shawn VanDiver, the group’s founder and president, “a moral disgrace. It spits in the face of our allies, our veterans, and every value we claim to uphold.”Trump’s latest travel ban, his ramped-up immigration deportation regime, his international student crackdown, and his all but ending asylum in the United States add up to a clearly a concerted attempt to stave off the inevitable while vilifying the marginal. Demographers have been telling us for years now that the US will be a “majority minority” country around 2045, a prospect that has long frightened many of the white conservatives who make up Trump’s base. In response, Trump is pursuing a policy that draws on the most basic kind of nativism around, and one we’ve seen before in the United States.The 1924 Immigration Act severely restricted immigration to the US to keep America as white and as western European as possible. Only in 1965 were the laws finally changed, with the national immigration quotas lifted, laying the foundation for the multicultural society we have today. That earlier movie of epic exclusion lasted some 41 years. So far, this sequel is violent, scary and authoritarian. It had better be a short film.

    Moustafa Bayoumi is a Guardian US columnist More

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    Trump signs order banning citizens of 12 countries from entering the US

    Donald Trump has signed a sweeping order banning travel from 12 countries and restricting travel from seven others, reviving and expanding the travel bans from his first term.The nationals of Afghanistan, Myanmar, Chad, Republic of the Congo, Equatorial Guinea, Eritrea, Haiti, Iran, Libya, Somalia, Sudan and Yemen will be “fully” restricted from entering the US, according to the proclamation. Meanwhile, the entry of nationals of Burundi, Cuba, Laos, Sierra Leone, Togo, Turkmenistan and Venezuela will be partially restricted.The US president said that he “considered foreign policy, national security, and counterterrorism goals” in deciding the scope of the ban. Trump had cued up the ban in an executive order signed on 20 January, his first day back in the White House, instructing his administration to submit a list of candidates for a ban by 21 March.Trump has cited a range of justifications for the bans, including national security and concerns that visitors from those countries are overstaying their visas.But advocates and experts have said that blanket travel bans discriminate against groups of people based on ethnicity alone. They will likely result – as the travels bans did during Trump’s first term – in the separation of families. The bans on travel from Haiti, Cuba and Venezuela could be especially impactful in US communities with huge immigrant populations from those countries.“This discriminatory policy, which limits legal immigration, not only flies in the face of what our country is supposed to stand for, it will be harmful to our economy and communities that rely on the contributions of people who come to America from this wide range of countries,” said Pramila Jayapal, a Democratic representative of Washington.The decision to ban travel from these countries comes amid a wave of hardline immigration policies that Trump has issued, including the blocking of asylum claims at the southern border and cancelling temporary protected status for immigrants from a number of countries facing deep humanitarian crises. Trump has also signed a proclamation to restrict foreign student visas at Harvard University and ordered US consulates to conduct social media screening of every visa applicant seeking to travel to the university.In a video message released on social media, Trump said he was making good on a promise to act following the recent attack at a Boulder, Colorado, event showing support for Israeli hostages. The attack by an Egyptian national “underscored the extreme dangers posed to our country by the entry of foreign nationals who are not properly vetted, as well as those who come here as temporary visitors and overstay their visas. We don’t want them,” he said.Trump added that the list was “subject to revisions based on whether material improvements are made” and that “likewise, new countries could be added as threats emerge around the world”.Having instituted a travel ban on Muslim countries early in his first term, Trump trailed his plans for a new ban during his election campaign against Kamala Harris last year.“I will ban refugee resettlement from terror-infested areas like the Gaza Strip, and we will seal our border and bring back the travel ban,” Trump said in September. “Remember the famous travel ban? We didn’t take people from certain areas of the world. We’re not taking them from infested countries.”skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotionView image in fullscreenHe was referring to the ban he imposed after taking office in January 2017, leading to chaos at airports as protesters and civil rights attorneys rushed to help affected travelers.Trump said the ban was needed to combat terrorist threats. It was blocked by federal courts on civil liberties grounds but the US supreme court, to which Trump would eventually appoint three hardline rightwing justices, allowed the ban to stand.The supreme court said Trump’s ban did not target Muslims – despite the fact it originally targeted travelers from Chad, Iran, Libya, Somalia, Syria and Yemen, Muslim-majority countries. According to the court, the ban fell within the remit of a president’s national security powers. North Korea and Venezuela were also included.The Council on American-Islamic Relations (Cair) said then: “The Muslim ban’s bigotry should have been as clear to the supreme court as it is to the Muslims demonized by it. Apparently, everyone but the supreme court can see the decision for what it is: an expression of animosity.”In 2020, shortly before the Covid pandemic drastically reduced world travel, Eritrea, Kyrgyzstan, Nigeria, Myanmar, Tanzania and Sudan were added to the ban.In 2021, that travel ban was among measures Joe Biden ended within hours of being sworn in as Trump’s White House successor. More

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    Trump administration mulling new travel restrictions on citizens from dozens of countries

    The Trump administration is considering issuing travel restrictions for the citizens of dozens of countries as part of a new ban, according to sources familiar with the matter and an internal memo seen by Reuters.The memo lists a total of 41 countries divided into three separate groups. The first group of 10 countries, including Afghanistan, Iran, Syria, Cuba and North Korea, among others, would be set for a full visa suspension.In the second group, five countries – Eritrea, Haiti, Laos, Myanmar and South Sudan – would face partial suspensions that would affect tourist and student visas as well as other immigrant visas, with some exceptions.In the third group, a total of 26 countries including Belarus, Pakistan and Turkmenistan, among others, would be considered for a partial suspension of US visa issuance if their governments “do not make efforts to address deficiencies within 60 days”, the memo said.The list has yet to be approved by the administration, including the US secretary of state, Marco Rubio, and could be amended, officials told the outlet.The memo follows an executive order issued on 20 January that requires intensified security vetting of any foreigners seeking admission to the US to detect national security threats, and directed several cabinet members to submit a list of countries for partial or full suspension because their “vetting and screening information is so deficient”.During the first Trump administration, in 2017, a partial ban imposed on travelers from predominantly Muslim-population nations was labeled a “Muslim ban” by Trump and his aides.Fourteen months earlier, after an Islamic State-inspired mass shooting in San Bernardino, California, Trump had called for “a total and complete” shutdown of Muslims entering the US “until our country’s representatives can figure out what the hell is going on”.A new set of restrictions, outlined in the memo, would follow pledges by the president to institute an immigration crackdown. In October 2023, Trump pledged to restrict people from the Gaza Strip, Libya, Somalia, Syria, Yemen and “anywhere else that threatens our security”.Any move to ban or restrict immigration from the list of 43 countries would come in tandem with Department of Homeland Security efforts to deport undocumented migrants affiliated with newly identified terrorist crime networks, including Venezuela’s Tren de Aragua, El Salvador’s MS-13 and the Mexican-American 18th St.At the same time, the Trump administration is moving to cancel immigration status and deport several foreign-born university graduates, including Columbia University graduate Mahmoud Khalil, who led campus protests against Israel’s war in Gaza last year.skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotionA second student who took part in protests around the university last year was arrested by federal immigration agents last week. Leqaa Kordia was arrested by officers from the US Immigration and Customs Enforcement office in Newark. Authorities said she had overstayed a terminated visa.The administration also revoked the visa of Ranjani Srinivasan, an Indian citizen and doctoral student at Columbia. Srinivasan opted to “self-deport” after officials said she was “involved in activities supporting Hamas”.In a statement on Friday, the homeland security secretary, Kristi Noem, said it’s a “privilege to be granted a visa to live and study in the United States of America”.“When you advocate for violence and terrorism that privilege should be revoked, and you should not be in this country,” Noem added. More

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    As a US diplomat, I helped circumvent Trump’s Muslim ban – then realised I was part of the problem | Josef Burton

    When I began working as a consular officer at the US embassy in Ankara, Turkey, I was at the beginning of what was supposed to be a 20-year diplomatic career. Maybe I didn’t love all of US foreign policy, but in my routine visa assignment I was deeply committed to treating everybody I interviewed fairly and playing my part in facilitating the American immigrant dream. Then, on 27 June 2017, Donald Trump issued orders to begin implementing the “Muslim ban”. My routine job had suddenly become deeply morally fraught and instead of blandly facilitating the American dream, I was denying it to people based on their faith.My first instinct was to draft a resignation letter, but I didn’t immediately send it because it felt at the time like I was part of a nigh-unanimous institutional rejection of an illiberal policy. More than 1,000 US diplomats put their signatures on an internal dissent cable against the Muslim ban when it was proclaimed. My boss hated the ban, my boss’ boss hated the ban, and the dozens of US ambassadors summoned to the foreign ministries of Muslim-majority countries to explain the policy tried to disown it as much as they possibly could. When I pushed back as much as I could, I did so with the full support of my bosses and colleagues. But, and this is the most important part, we always did so within the regulations.We wanted to get waivers and exceptions for every applicant possible, so we sounded out exactly what criteria for waiving the ban Washington would accept. (Family separation? Loss of a valued employee for an American business?) We found where the bar was, we created templates and standard operating procedures, and got to work slotting as many people as we could into them. Within a few months, the ban interviews were rote checklists rather than impassioned pleas for humanity. Every applicant we got who checked the boxes was a moral victory; every one who didn’t make it was tragic. But, hey, we got to tell ourselves that we tried. As time wore on, I realised that fighting for individual waivers and exemptions was resistance by pedantry. What I found myself engaging in was a deeply non-confrontational performance of virtue rather than an act of sabotage.Joe Biden repealed the Muslim ban on the first day of his presidency. When secretary of state Antony Blinken informed us that the policy had ended, he declared that the ban was “a stain on our national conscience”. It was never said in as many words, but the implication was that because we managed the policy to optimise exemptions and because we felt bad about it, and because leadership repudiated the policy in retrospect, it meant that we weren’t implicated. That the issue was settled.But it isn’t settled. The presidential proclamation repealing the Muslim ban did not surrender a single iota of the authority to implement future bans. It was only when the Muslim ban was finally over that I fully realised what I had been part of; we created another tool in the toolbox, a set of procedures and standards for processing travel bans, waivers and exemptions that could be put to literally any purpose. Our internal resistance was fundamentally morally agnostic because we fought within the technical bounds of policy implementation rather than the fact of its declaration.I quit the US state department a few months later. I quit because, despite all of our efforts from within the system to fight against the Muslim ban, there is nothing stopping a future president from reinstating it, or something like it. Trump has outright promised to reinstate an expanded and harsher Muslim ban if re-elected. I am confident that junior US diplomats in the same position I was will be disgusted, will try to push back. They might even dust off some of the old templates I made. But they will only serve to make things run smoother next time. A certain proportion of Muslim immigrants will find waivers. Some – maybe thousands, maybe most – sadly won’t, but the people implementing the ban will be better positioned to repudiate another future “stain on our national conscience”.Resistance that shaves off the rough edges of inhumane policy without reversing it is not resistance, it is complicity. As theorist Stafford Beer says: “The purpose of a system is what it does,” and an immigration system with a smoothly running Muslim ban that has generous provision for waivers and exemptions is still an immigration system that bans Muslims. I quit the US diplomatic corps because internal resistance to a racist and illiberal political project is a losing bargain.
    Josef Burton is a former US diplomat who served in Turkey, India and Washington DC More

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    For Trump and Modi, ethnic purity is the purpose of power | Jason Stanley

    The two strongmen favour immigration and citizenship policies designed to demonise minority groups The US president, Donald Trump, has delighted a stadium of 125,000 cheering Indians in Gujarat by declaring: “America loves India. America respects India. And America will always be a faithful and loyal friend to the Indian people.” It might seem a discordant […] More

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    Trump administration unveils expanded travel ban

    Nationals of Eritrea, Kyrgyzstan, Myanmar and Nigeria affected Separate move will stop ‘diversity visas’ for Sudan and Tanzania Demonstrators rally outside in Richmond, Virginia, on Wednesday where the US court of appeals will hear arguments against Donald Trump’s existing travel ban. Photograph: Steve Helber/AP The Trump administration is expanding the reach of its controversial travel […] More