Foreign CNN star mocked for being afraid to travel to US under Trump

Daily Mail​

2 days ago

CNN megastar Christiane Amanpour was brutally mocked after she admitted she was 'afraid' to travel to America under President Donald Trump. The British-Iranian journalist shared her feelings on the podcast 'The Ex Files' on Wednesday, talking with her ex-husband and co-host Jamie Rubin about her recent trip to the US.
Amanpour, 67, said she traveled to the States last month to give a speech at her alma mater Harvard Kennedy School, but traveling to the US made her feel like she 'was going to North Korea .' 'I must say I was afraid. I'm a foreigner. I don't have a green card. I'm not an American citizen. I'm fairly prominent, and I literally prepared to go to America as if I was going to North Korea,' she told Rubin. 'I took a burner phone. Imagine that. I didn't take a single…not my mobile phone, not my iPad , nothing, and I had nothing on the burner phone except a few numbers.'
People quickly took aim at the journalist, seemingly mocking her for her comments. 'Don't visit. We will survive,' a user wrote on X. 'CNN's Christiane Amanpour is free to remain wherever she feels safe. Feel afraid to travel to America, then don't come here. Simple,' another said. 'She is full of [expletive],' someone else wrote. 'We don't need evil like you entering this country anyway so stay out,' another quipped.
Another told her to go after former President Joe Biden instead of Trump, telling her to 'criticize the guy who opened the borders and fucked up immigration, not the guy fixing it.' 'Then stay in England,' said one, as someone else wrote: 'Nobody cares.' Although she feared for the worst, Amanpour soon revealed her welcome to the county 'could not have been nicer.'
'So, huge sigh of relief I breathed, but wow, can you imagine if I'm afraid, what do others think?,' she added. Amanpour also said her fears grew and prompted her to discuss with the network's security team because other British citizens told her they were either turned around at the border and detained for hours on end.
Rubin then chimed in about Trump's recent decision to bar foreign students from attending the Ivy League. 'With Donald Trump's basically weaponization of the immigration and naturalization service to scrutinize people, to imagine that every single non-American is a threat to the United States, is a war on what our country has been since its founding,' he said. The president announced Wednesday that he banned foreign nationals from studying at Harvard University as he continues to class with the institution.
He issued an executive order entitled Enhancing National Security by Addressing Risks at Harvard University, which suspends the school's student visa program - calling it a 'privilege granted by our government, not a guarantee.' He also doubled down on his claims that the school violated federal law and argued it is important to limit international students for national security reasons. 'The Federal Bureau of Investigation has long warned that foreign adversaries and competitors take advantage of easy access to American higher education to, among other things, steal technical information and products, exploit expensive research and development to advance their own ambitions and spread false information for political or other reasons,' the executive order stated.
'Our adversaries, including the People's Republic of China try to take advantage of American higher education by exploiting the student visa program for improper purposes and by using visiting students to collect information at elite universities in the United States.' Harvard has nearly 6,800 international students, making up more than 27 percent of its enrollment in the past academic year, according to the BBC. On the same day, Trump also signed another bombshell executive order that bans visitors from 19 countries from entering the US.
Nationals of Afghanistan, Chad, Congo, Equatorial Guinea, Eritrea, Haiti, Iran , Libya, Myanmar, Somalia, Sudan and Yemen will be barred from entering the United States under the new order, which goes into effect on June 9. Citizens of Burundi, Cuba, Laos, Sierra Leone, Togo, Turkmenistan and Venezuela will be partially restricted from traveling, removing access to all immigrant visas and several non-immigrant travel options.
Trump also issued a warning that Egypt could soon join the no-fly list in the wake of the Colorado terror attack in which an Egyptian national who overstayed his visa allegedly set fire to pro-Israel demonstrators. 'We don't want 'em,' Trump said bluntly in a video released shortly after the ban was announced. 'Very simply, we cannot have open migration from any country where we cannot safely and reliably vet and screen.'