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      Donald Trump is losing control of American foreign policy | Christopher S Chivvis

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      Iran and the US have stood at a crossroads in recent weeks. Down one path lay negotiations that, while difficult, promised benefits to the citizens of both countries. Down the other path, a protracted war that promised little more than destruction.Back in 2018, Donald Trump had blocked the diplomatic path by tearing up the existing nuclear agreement with Iran – the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action. But since beginning his second term in January he has been surprisingly open to negotiations with Tehran. Iran’s supreme leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, seemed ready to go along.But the Israeli prime minister, Benjamin Netanyahu, has now decided for them in favor of the path of war, and despite initial hesitation, Trump now appears to be following him. Though uniquely positioned to rein in Netanyahu – more than any US president in decades – Trump has jumped on his bandwagon.After entering office, Trump rightly pursued a deal that would offer Iran sanctions relief in return for an end to its nuclear weapons program. This deal would have served the interests of both parties. The risk of an Iranian nuclear breakout would have been greatly reduced, thus reducing pressure on other regional and global powers to pursue nuclear weapons themselves. Global energy markets would have benefited. The United States could have meanwhile pursued the drawdown of its military forces in the region, thus furthering a goal of every US president since Barack Obama. Improved US relations with Iran would also have helped to complicate Iran’s deepening ties to Russia and China.But the Israeli government wanted none of this and has therefore spoiled the Trump administration’s negotiations. The Israeli government claims that Iran was days away from a bomb and that it had no choice but to attack. This is hard to believe. For years, experts, including the US intelligence community, have estimated it would take months if not years for Iran to not only produce enough highly enriched uranium but to also build a bomb with it. If this timeline had changed in recent days, the US would almost certainly have joined Israel in these strikes.The strikes also will not end Iran’s nuclear program. The damage will be real, and military operations are ongoing, but Israel is ultimately only capable of destroying parts of Iran’s program. The destruction of the uranium enrichment facility at Natanz is a setback for Iran, but these facilities can be rebuilt. The assassination of Iran’s nuclear scientists is a blow, but their knowledge can also be replaced over time. History shows that so-called decapitation strikes can have a near-term effect, but they rarely work in the long term. Even if the United States now joins Israel in strikes, this will not eliminate Iran’s weapons program entirely without a regime change operation against Tehran. That strategy would repeat the tragic errors of the 2003 Iraq war, but on an even larger scale.Iran’s nuclear weapons program will thus remain in some form. But hope of negotiations to control it is now badly damaged. The result is the worst of both worlds: a vengeful Iran even more determined to get nuclear weapons and no hope of negotiating a way out.Marco Rubio, the US secretary of state, has wisely attempted to distance the United States from Israel’s attack. Trump, however, who initially tried to rein in Israel’s attack, has now tried to use it as leverage to get Tehran to sign up for his deal. Aligning America so closely with Israel at this juncture is only likely to draw the United States more deeply into the conflict and expose it to Iranian reprisals.As a negotiating tactic it is also unlikely to work. The autocrats in Tehran cannot allow themselves to be visibly coerced into a deal lest it damage their domestic legitimacy. Some powerful Iranian officials moreover benefit from the status quo under sanctions, which have enriched a powerful few at the cost of the Iranian people.Israel’s audacious move is another example of US partners seizing the strategic initiative from Trump. Israel’s strikes come on the heels of the decision by the Ukrainian president, Volodymyr Zelenskyy, to strike deep into Russia with drones at the very moment the US was attempting to negotiate a ceasefire with Moscow.With the US focused on the turmoil the Trump administration is whipping up domestically, and so much uncertainty about the trajectory of Trump’s global policy goals, other actors are probably going to do the same. Unless the administration can find the discipline and focus to get control over its own foreign policy, the United States risks getting dragged into more conflicts that will not serve the interests of the American people.

      Chris Chivvis is a senior fellow and director of the American Statecraft Program at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace More

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      The Guardian view on Israel’s shock attack on Iran: confusing US signals add to the peril | Editorial

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      US presidents who thought they could easily restrain Benjamin Netanyahu have quickly learned their lesson. “Who’s the fucking superpower?” Bill Clinton reportedly exploded after his first meeting with the Israeli prime minister.Did Donald Trump make the same mistake? The state department quickly declared that the devastating overnight Israeli attack on Iran – which killed key military commanders and nuclear scientists as well as striking its missile capacity and a nuclear enrichment site – was unilateral. Mr Trump had reportedly urged Mr Netanyahu to hold off in a call on Monday, pending US talks with Iran over its nuclear programme due this weekend. The suspicion is that Israel feared that a deal might be reached and wanted to strike first. But Israeli officials have briefed that they had a secret green light from the US, with Mr Trump only claiming to oppose it.Iran, reeling from the attack but afraid of looking too weak to retaliate, is unlikely to believe that the US did not acquiesce to the offensive, if unenthusiastically. It might suit it better to pretend otherwise – in the short term, it is not clear what ability it has to hit back at Israel, never mind taking on the US. But Mr Trump has made that hard by threatening “even more brutal attacks” ahead, urging Iran to “make a deal, before there’s nothing left” and claiming that “we knew everything”. Whether Israel really convinced Mr Trump that this was the way to cut a deal, or he is offering a post-hoc justification after being outflanked by Mr Netanyahu, may no longer matter.Israel has become increasingly and dangerously confident of its ability to reshape the Middle East without pushing it over the brink. It believes that its previous pummellings of Hamas, Hezbollah and Iran’s air defences have created a brief opportunity to destroy the existential threat posed by the Iranian nuclear programme before it is too late. Russia is not about to ride to Tehran’s rescue, and while Gulf states don’t want instability, they are not distraught to see an old rival weakened.But not least in the reckoning is surely that Mr Netanyahu, who survives politically through military action, only narrowly survived a Knesset vote this week. The government also faces mounting international condemnation over its war crimes in Gaza – though the US and others allow those crimes to continue. It is destroying the nation’s international reputation, yet may bolster domestic support through this campaign.The obvious question is the future of a key Iranian enrichment site deep underground at Fordo, which many believe Israel could not destroy without US “bunker busters”. If Israel believes that taking out personnel and some infrastructure is sufficient to preclude Iran’s nuclear threat, that is a huge and perilous gamble. This attack may well trigger a rush to full nuclear-armed status by Tehran – and ultimately others – and risks spurring more desperate measures in the meantime. Surely more likely is that Israel hopes to draw in Washington, by persuading it that Iran is a paper tiger or baiting Tehran into attacking US targets.“My proudest legacy will be that of a peacemaker and unifier,” Mr Trump claimed in his inaugural speech. Yet on Friday he said was not concerned about a regional war breaking out due to Israel’s strikes. Few will feel so sanguine. The current incoherence and incomprehensibility of US foreign policy fuels instability and risks drawing adversaries towards fateful miscalculations.

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      Trump trade deal shows how vital China’s rare-earth metals are to US defense firms

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      The draft trade agreement with China announced by Donald Trump on Wednesday would ease concerns from top US military suppliers about rare-earth metals and magnets that, if cut off permanently, could hobble production of everything from smart bombs to fighter jets to submarines and other weapons in the US arsenal.While the deal has not yet been finalised, it may reassure major defense companies such as Lockheed Martin, the largest US user of samarium – a rare-earth metal used in military-grade magnets – whose supply is entirely controlled by China.The issue of China’s export restrictions on the metals and magnets was so important that Trump specifically mentioned them as part of his announcement of a broader trade agreement with China that would reduce US tariffs to 55% and Chinese tariffs to 10%.“Our deal with China is done, subject to final approval with President Xi and me,” Trump wrote. “Full magnets, and any necessary rare earths, will be supplied, up front, by China.”Rare earths are crucial to the production of F-35 fighter jets, Virginia- and Columbia-class nuclear-powered submarines, Tomahawk missiles, radar systems, unmanned aerial vehicles and smart bombs, according to Gracelin Baskaran of the Center for Strategic and International Studies, a thinktank.China in April imposed export restrictions on seven rare earth elements during the tough negotiations over Trump’s new tariffs. China also targeted the aerospace and defense industries by limiting 15 US entities with ties to the industry from receiving dual-use goods.“The United States is already on the back foot when it comes to manufacturing these defense technologies,” Baskaran said in an interview published by CSIS. “China is rapidly expanding its munitions production and acquiring advanced weapons systems and equipment at a pace five to six times faster than the United States. While China is preparing with a wartime mindset, the United States continues to operate under peacetime conditions.”Trump has amassed a team of foreign policy China hawks, including a number who have warned that the US should focus more on the pacing threat posed by China over the coming decades instead of current conflicts in Ukraine or the Middle East.“Even before the latest restrictions, the US defense industrial base struggled with limited capacity and lacked the ability to scale up production to meet defense technology demands,” she continued. “Further bans on critical minerals inputs will only widen the gap, enabling China to strengthen its military capabilities more quickly than the United States.”China and the US had agreed last month in Geneva to pause the implementation of sky-high tariffs that would have delivered a severe economic blow to manufacturers and consumers in the US, as well as exporters in China.But China maintained export licenses on rare-earth metals used by both defense producers and carmakers that threatened to upend global supply chains and imperil production in the US.In particular, China has a stranglehold on the production and export of samarium, a magnet used in combination with cobalt to provide highly durable magnets used to withstand the intense temperatures in military-grade tech. China produces the entire world’s supply of the rare-earth metal.skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotionIn particular, the magnets are important for the production of guided missiles, satellite-guided “smart bombs”, and aircrafts, including fighter jets, according to Apex Magnets, a supplier.Those supplies of weapons have been depleted through deliveries of missiles and other ordnance to Ukraine and to the Israeli military. Pentagon planners and other officials in the administration of Joe Biden, regularly squared off over whether foreign weapons deliveries expose a US vulnerability in case it faced off with a major military power.In order to break the deadlock, secretary of state Marco Rubio also abruptly announced plans to cancel hundreds of thousands of visas for Chinese students in the US. While publicly that was said as a plan to root out Chinese spies in US higher education, Axios reported that the visa ban was also motivated by China’s obstinance on resuming rare earths exports.The breakthrough comes as Trump is planning to display US military prowess at a parade in Washington DC this weekend that has been seen as an attempt to flex American muscle and reinforce the US president’s bonafides as a supporter of the military.Trump in 2019 ordered the Pentagon to find new sources of procuring rare earth minerals, in particular samarium, because the US did not have the capacity to produce them domestically. The initiative was “essential to the national defense”, he said then. More

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      Majority of Canadians dislike US in face of trade policy and sovereignty threats

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      A majority of Canadians hold unfavourable views towards the US, their closest ally, as frustration over trade policy and threats to Canada’s sovereignty persist.Canada’s growing dislike of its closest trading partner mirrors a shared skepticism in other G7 countries, according to a new poll that finds that Americans like their allies far more than those nations approve of the US.The results come as Canadians maintain boycotts of American goods and avoid travel to the US in response to tariffs imposed by Donald Trump’s administration. But the results of the survey also show the challenge for Mark Carney as the Canadian prime minister seeks to ease tensions between the two economically entwined nations.According to the newly released study from the Pew Research Center, a majority of Americans see the other G7 countries favourably. More than seven in 10 have positive views of Japan (77%), Canada (74%), Italy (74%) and the UK (70%).Those finds come as leaders from those nations prepare to meet in the Canadian province of Alberta later this week for the G7 summit.But those feelings of goodwill are not reciprocated.Populations in all of the G7 countries hold more skeptical views towards the US, with the largest decrease in favorability toward the US among G7 countries coming from Canada. Only one-third of Canadians (34%) think positively of their southern neighbour today, compared with 54% last year.Sixty-four percent of Canadians now hold unfavourable views of the US, and nearly 40% say they hold very unfavourable views of their neighbour, up from 15% who felt that way last year.Canadian wariness towards the US is also reflected in new travel data from Statistics Canada, which found return trips by air fell nearly 25% in May 2025 compared with the same month in 2024. Canadian-resident return trips by automobile dropped by nearly 40% – the fifth consecutive month of year-over-year declines.Carney crafted his successful federal election campaign around a patriotic defiance against Trump’s threats to the nation’s sovereignty. Carney also used his first post-election press conference to once again quash any idea Canada was interested in becoming the 51st US state, a proposal repeatedly floated by Trump.skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotionA positive meeting between the two leaders at the White House in May buoyed hopes among business leaders and diplomats the pair could break the impasse over tariffs. Those fears were dashed after Trump doubled tariffs on Canadian steel and aluminum.Earlier this week, Carney announced Canada would spend far more on its defence budget – a key ask of Trump – while at the same time underscoring his government’s pledge to reduce reliance on the US.“We stood shoulder to shoulder with the Americans throughout the cold war and in the decades that followed, as the United States played a dominant role on the world stage,” he said. “Today, that dominance is a thing of the past.” More

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      ‘Demoralizing’: Venezuelans experience confusion and fear amid Trump travel ban

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      As the sun rose over Caracas, Yasmin Quintero, a grandmother, was already in line at the city’s airport, trying to board the next available flight to Bogotá, Colombia.She had originally planned to travel from Medellín to Florida on 12 June to visit her son, a US citizen, and help care for her granddaughter.But once her family learned about the Trump administration’s travel ban on citizens from 12 countries – including Venezuela – they moved her trip forward, forfeiting the original tickets.“The prices more than doubled in less than two hours,” she said. Now, Quintero was facing three connecting flights to reach her family – and she had lost hundreds of dollars in the process.The new ban went into effect at 12am ET on Monday, more than eight years after Donald Trump’s first travel ban sparked chaos, confusion and months of legal battles.The proclamation, which Trump signed on 4 June, “fully” restricts the nationals of Afghanistan, Myanmar, Chad, Republic of the Congo, Equatorial Guinea, Eritrea, Haiti, Iran, Libya, Somalia, Sudan and Yemen from entering the US. But restrictions were also imposed on nationals of Burundi, Cuba, Laos, Sierra Leone, Togo, Turkmenistan and Venezuela.The US state department later clarified that travelers with visas issued before 8 June would “generally be permitted to travel and will be inspected by CBP [Customs and Border Protection] in alignment with current law and regulation, if no other boarding concerns are identified”.But by then, the vaguely worded presidential proclamation had already sparked panic: in Caracas, all flights to countries connecting to the US sold out as Venezuelans with valid visas rushed to reach the US before the ban came into effect.On Friday morning, Sonia Méndez de Zapata anxiously urged her son Ignacio to proceed straight to security after check-in. Ignacio, who is studying engineering in North Carolina, had returned home in late May to spend the summer with his family. But student visas are also affected by the new restrictions, and as soon as the news broke he cut short his visit after just 10 days back home.The family arrived at Simón Bolívar international airport at least four hours ahead of his flight to Curaçao, the first leg of a hastily rearranged itinerary. “He would lose his life if he stays here,” Méndez de Zapata said, expressing concern about the lack of opportunities for young people in Venezuela.For others, the announcement shattered long-held routines. Sara Fishmann, a consultant who has travelled to the US regularly for over three decades, said it was the first time she felt anxious about entering the country. The US, she said, had become a natural gathering place for her dispersed family.“Now I’m scared it will no longer be a place where we can reunite,” she said. “I don’t even know who we’re the victims of any more. It feels like all of them – the politicians.”Members of the Venezuelan diaspora – now nearly 8 million strong – have also felt the impact of the decision. Among them is Iván Lira, who lost his job at a US-funded NGO in March after the suspension of USAID operations in Venezuela. Lira, who now lives in Bogotá, was supposed to be the best man at his cousin’s wedding in the US on 20 June.“Not being able to attend would be demoralizing,” Lira said. “We’re practically brothers. Not being there on such an important day – one that will be remembered forever – would be painful.”He described the prevailing mood among Venezuelans as one of desperation. “It’s a decision that stigmatizes Venezuelan people,” Lira added.The US justified Venezuela’s inclusion in the ban on the grounds that the government of Nicolás Maduro has long refused to accept deported nationals.Opposition politicians – who have looked to Washington to support their efforts against Maduro – remained silent on the travel ban until 6 June, when the opposition figurehead María Corina Machado’s party, Vente Venezuela, published a statement via X urging the US government to revise the travel restrictions, arguing that Venezuelans are victims of a “criminal regime” and forced into mass displacement. Machado reposted it on X but did not comment further.Machado – who enjoys broad support among US officials and politicians – has long been seen as a leading figure in the fight for democracy in Venezuela.Francis García, who has lived in Argentina for over seven years, knows the weight of the Venezuelan passport all too well. She frequently travels to the US to see her long-distance partner. But during her most recent trip, she was subjected to aggressive questioning at the border.“Being Venezuelan, nothing is ever simple,” García said. “You leave the country, but it doesn’t matter. I left hoping things would get easier – but they never do.”Meanwhile, as travelers scrambled to leave, Simón Bolívar international airport swelled with police officers accompanying passengers on the latest flight under the government’s “Return to the Homeland” plan – a voluntary repatriation scheme framed as “self-deportation”. More

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      Trump travel ban barring citizens from 12 countries goes into effect

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      Donald Trump’s new ban on travel to the US by citizens of a dozen countries, mainly in Africa and the Middle East, went into effect at 12am ET on Monday, more than eight years after Trump’s first travel ban sparked chaos, confusion, and months of legal battles.The new proclamation, which Trump signed last week, “fully” restricts the nationals of Afghanistan, Myanmar, Chad, Republic of the Congo, Equatorial Guinea, Eritrea, Haiti, Iran, Libya, Somalia, Sudan and Yemen from entering the US. The entry of nationals of Burundi, Cuba, Laos, Sierra Leone, Togo, Turkmenistan and Venezuela will be partially restricted.Unlike Trump’s first travel ban in 2017, which initially targeted citizens of seven Muslim-majority countries and was criticized as an unconstitutional “Muslim ban”, the new ban is broader, and legal experts said they expect it to withstand legal challenges.The announcement of the new travel ban was greeted with less outrage and protest than his initial 2017 ban. On Monday, the new ban appeared to be overshadowed by Trump’s other immigration battles, including furious protests in Los Angeles over Trump’s deportation raids, which were followed by Trump deploying the national guard to the city despite the opposition of California’s governor.The newly instituted ban notably includes citizens of Haiti, a majority Christian country. Haitians in the US were demonized by Trump during his presidential campaign, with the president spreading the baseless conspiracy theory that Haitian immigrants in Ohio were eating people’s pets.It also imposes heightened travel restrictions on citizens of Venezuela, who have been targeted repeatedly by the White House in recent months, as the Trump administration’s sudden deportation of Venezuelans in the US to a notorious prison in El Salvador sparked a massive legal battle.The ban is also expected to have a disproportionate effect on African countries, with some citizens of targeted countries worrying about being cut off from opportunities for education, professional development, and networking.Mikhail Nyamweya, a political and foreign affairs analyst, previously told the Guardian that the new travel bans and restrictions would “bring about a pattern of exclusion” and “may also institutionalise a perception of Africans as outsiders in the global order”.“This policy is not about national security – it is about sowing division and vilifying communities that are seeking safety and opportunity in the United States,” Abby Maxman, president of Oxfam America, a nonprofit international relief organization, said.While five of the countries on the new ban list are not majority-Muslim, including Republic of the Congo, Myanmar, Eritrea and Equatorial Guinea, as well as Haiti, the list does target citizens of non-white countries in the developing world, fueling criticisms that the ban is fundamentally racist and shaped by “bigotry”.Trump’s first travel ban, in 2017, was widely criticized as a fulfillment of Trump’s campaign pledge to institute “a total and complete shutdown of Muslims entering the United States”. The Trump administration later added citizens of other non-Muslim countries to the banned list.The new ban does not revoke visas previously issued to people from countries on the list, according to guidance issued Friday to all US diplomatic missions. However, unless an applicant meets narrow criteria for an exemption to the ban, his or her application will be rejected starting Monday. Travelers with previously issued visas should still be able to enter the US even after the ban takes effect.In a video posted Wednesday on social media, Trump said nationals of countries included in the ban pose “terrorism-related” and “public-safety” risks, as well as risks of overstaying their visas. He also said some of these countries had “deficient” screening and vetting or have historically refused to take back their citizens.Trump also tied the new ban to a recent attack in Boulder, Colorado that wounded a dozen people, saying it underscored the dangers posed by some visitors who overstay visas. US officials say the alleged perpetrator overstayed a tourist visa. The man charged in the attack is from Egypt, a country that is not on Trump’s restricted list.The Associated Press contributed reporting More

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

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      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 travel ban comes as little surprise amid barrage of draconian restrictions

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      Donald Trump’s first travel ban in 2017 had an immediate, explosive impact – spawning chaos at airports nationwide.This time around, the panic and chaos was already widespread by the time the president signed his proclamation Wednesday to fully or partially restrict foreign nationals from 19 countries from entering the United States.Since being sworn in for his second term, Trump has unleashed a barrage of draconian immigration restrictions. Within hours of taking office, the president suspended the asylum system at the southern border as part of his wide-ranging immigration crackdown. His administration has ended temporary legal residency for 211,000 Haitians, 117,000 Venezuelans and 110,000 Cubans, and moved to revoke temporary protected status for several groups of immigrants. It has moved to restrict student visas and root out scholars who have come to the US legally.“It’s death by 1,000 cuts,” said Faisal Al-Juburi of the Texas-based legal non-profit Raices, which was among several immigrants’ rights groups that challenged Trump’s first travel ban. “And that’s kind of the point. It’s creating layers and layers of restrictions.”Trump’s first travel ban in January 2017, issued days after he took office, targeted the predominantly Muslim countries of Iraq, Syria, Iran, Sudan, Libya, Somalia and Yemen. The order came as a shock – including to many administration officials. Customs and Border Protection officials were initially given little guidance on how to enact the ban. Lawyers and protesters rushed to international airports where travellers were stuck in limbo. Confusion spread through colleges and tech companies in the US, and refugee camps across the world.This time, Trump’s travel ban came as no surprise. He had cued up the proclamation 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. Though he finally signed a proclamation enacting the ban on Wednesday, it will not take effect until 9 June – allowing border patrol officers and travellers a few days to prepare.The ban includes several exemptions, including for people with visas who are already in the United States, green-card holders, dual citizens and athletes or coaches traveling to the US for major sporting events such as the World Cup or the Olympics. It also exempts Afghans eligible for the special immigrant visa program for those who helped the US during the war in Afghanistan.But the policy, which is likely to face legal challenges, will undoubtedly once again separate families and disproportionately affect people seeking refuge from humanitarian crises.“This is horrible, to be clear … and it’s still something that reeks of arbitrary racism and xenophobia,” Al-Juburi said. “But this does not yield the type of chaos that January 2017 yielded, because immigration overall has been upended to such a degree that the practice of immigration laws is in a state of chaos.”In his second term, Trump has taken unprecedented steps to tear down legal immigration. He has eliminated the legal status of thousands of international students and instructed US embassies worldwide to stop scheduling visa interviews as it prepares to ramp up social media vetting for international scholars.The administration has arrested people at immigration check-ins, exiled asylum seekers to a notorious mega-prison in El Salvador, and detained scholars and travellers at airports without reason. Although Trump’s travel ban excludes green-card holders, his Department of Homeland Security has made clear that it can and will revoke green cards as it sees fit – including in the cases of student activists Mahmoud Khalil and Mohsen Mahdawi.skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotion“The first Muslim ban was very targeted, it was brutal, it was immediate, and it was massive,” said Nihad Awad, the executive director at the Council on American–Islamic Relations. “Now, the administration is not only targeting nations with certain religious affiliations, but also people of color overall, people who criticise the US government for its funding of the genocide in Gaza.”And this new travel ban comes as many families are still reeling and recovering from Trump’s first ban. “We’re looking at, essentially, a ban being in place potentially for eight out of 12 years,” said Ryan Costello, policy director at the National Iranian American Council. “And even in that period where the Biden administration lifted the ban, it was still very hard for Iranians to get a visa.”Iranian Americans who came to the US fleeing political persecution back home, who couldn’t return to Iran, have in some cases been unable to see their parents, siblings or other loved ones for years. “You want your parents to be able to come for the birth of a child, or to come to your wedding,” Costello said. “So this is a really hard moment for so many families. And I think unfortunately, there’s much more staying power for this ban.”Experts say the new ban is more likely to stand up to legal challenges as his first ban. It also doesn’t appear to have registered the same intense shock and outrage, culturally.“The first time, we saw this immediate backlash, protests at airports,” said Costello. “Now, over time, Trump has normalized this.” More