Donald Trump's travel ban: Why? And why now?

Al Jazeera

a day ago

Washington, DC – Donald Trump's travel ban is the latest instalment in the United States president's anti-immigration push, which plays to his right-wing base, advocates say, stressing that the order is not about public safety.
The decree, released late on Wednesday, bars and restricts travellers from 12 countries, including Afghanistan, Myanmar, Chad, Haiti, Iran, Libya, Somalia, Sudan and Yemen.
While Trump has argued that the ban was put in place to protect the US from 'foreign terrorists', many believe the president has other motivations for implementing it.
'The latest travel ban is absolutely part and parcel of the administration's agenda to weaponise immigration laws to target people who are racial and religious minorities and people with whom they disagree,' said Laurie Ball Cooper, vice president for US legal programmes at the International Refugee Assistance Project.
Abed Ayoub, executive director at the American-Arab Anti-Discrimination Committee (ADC), said that while the administration is presenting the ban as related to vetting travellers, the move aims to 'placate' Trump's supporters.
'It's the 'tough on immigration' stance that this administration has taken on a number of issues since coming into office,' Ayoub told Al Jazeera.
Since his inauguration in January, the Trump administration has gutted the US refugee programme, aggressively stepped up deportations and targeted foreign students critical of Israel – in some cases, pushing to remove them from the country.
Immigration experts said they had been anticipating the travel ban since Trump signed an executive order in January that paved the way for it.
That order directed US officials to compile a list of nations 'for which vetting and screening information is so deficient as to warrant a partial or full suspension on the admission of nationals from those countries'.
Trump said in the statement announcing the ban that the targeted countries 'remain deficient with regards to screening and vetting'.
This is not the first time Trump has ordered a travel ban. Wednesday's order has several predecessors – multiple iterations of a ban that the US president imposed during his first term as president.
One week after taking office in 2017, Trump barred citizens from seven Muslim-majority countries, an order that became widely known as the 'Muslim ban'.
As a candidate in 2015, he called for 'a total and complete shutdown of Muslims entering the United States', and the 2017 proclamation appeared to be a reflection of that proposal.
However, there are key differences between the latest order and the one implemented in 2017, which sparked disorder and protests at airports and initially applied to legal permanent residents and people who already had visas.
Wednesday's order lists specific exemptions, including for existing visa holders, who will still be able to come to the US using their visas, which will remain valid. Immediate relatives of US citizens will also be able to apply for and obtain visas.
Trump has also ordered it to go into effect on Monday – five days after the executive order was signed – whereas the original 'Muslim ban' was implemented immediately and chaotically as soon as he announced it.
Moreover, the latest travel ban targets countries with people from different religious backgrounds across four continents, making it difficult to argue religious bias in any court challenge.
Also, the early bans of Trump's first term were struck down by federal judges before the Supreme Court eventually upheld the third and last version his administration issued.
'It seems like a lot more thought went into this, a lot more reasoning from their end,' Ayoub said. He added that in some ways, the ban is 'not as bad' as the 2017 one and it will be difficult to challenge.
With the courts unlikely to block the order, Ayoub said he hopes the administration will issue more exemptions and work with the targeted countries to take steps that would remove them from the list.
Cooper said the impact of the ban will be devastating.
For example, the exemption on immediate relatives does not include the parents and children of permanent residents – people who have followed the rules and may have been waiting for years to get their immigration interviews to join their loved ones in the US.
'There are still people on the cusp of reuniting with their families, on the cusp of arriving to safety in the United States who will be cut off from that family reunification and from that access to safety by this travel ban,' Cooper told Al Jazeera. 'Families will be kept apart.'
The timing of Wednesday's decree also differs from the original 'Muslim ban'. It came more than five months into Trump's second term.
Trump has tied the travel ban to an attack on Sunday that US authorities attributed to an Egyptian asylum seeker. They accused him of using a makeshift flamethrower and Molotov cocktails to injure 12 people who were protesting in Boulder, Colorado in support of Israeli captives held in Gaza.
However, Egypt is not on the list of banned countries, and when asked why not on Thursday, Trump told reporters that the country is a US ally that has 'things under control'.
'And why now? I can say that it can't come soon enough, frankly,' Trump said.
'We want to keep bad people out of our country. The Biden administration allowed some horrendous people, and we are getting them out one by one.'
Cooper said the Trump administration is 'exploiting the tragedy' in Colorado by rolling out the order in its aftermath.
'Ultimately, if you look at the travel ban and the way that it operates, I am not convinced that this is a response to that,' she said.
'But even if it were, even when there is a tragedy, even when something awful happens, punishing groups of people based on their nationality because of what one other person allegedly did is not the right answer.'
Cooper added that the order is 'arbitrary', noting that it includes exemptions for athletes competing in next year's World Cup and the 2028 Summer Olympics but not for students.
Some Democrats have accused Trump of imposing the ban now to distract from his issues at home, including an enormous tax bill advancing through Congress and his feud with his former billionaire aide Elon Musk.
'Anytime you ban people coming to the United States from other countries, it has a real impact,' Senator Chris Murphy told MSNBC.
'But it is chiefly in service of trying to get us all talking about that … instead of talking about the centrepiece of this story, which is this bill to make the rich even richer at the expense of everybody else.'