Diluted travel order ready to fly
UNITED STATES: A draft of President Donald Trump’s revised immigration ban targets the same seven countries listed in his original executive order and exempts travellers who already have a visa to travel to the US, even if they haven’t used it yet.
A senior administration official said the order, which Trump revised after federal courts held up his original immigration and refugee ban, will target only those same seven Muslim-majority countries – Iran, Iraq, Syria, Yemen, Somalia, Sudan and Libya.
The official said green-card holders and dual citizens of the US and any of those countries are exempt. The new draft also no longer directs authorities to single out – and reject – Syrian refugees’ applications for a new visa.
The official spoke on condition of anonymity to discuss the order before it’s made public. The official noted that the draft is subject to change ahead of its signing, which Trump said could come sometime this week.
Asked about the revised order, White House spokeswoman Sarah Huckabee Sanders said the document circulating was a draft and that a final version should be released soon.
Trump’s original executive order triggered chaos at airports around the world, as travellers were detained when the order rapidly went into effect.
Attorneys to provide legal assistance for those held and protesters descended on the airports as news of the order’s implementation spread. In its original form, the order temporarily suspended all travel to the US for citizens of those seven Muslimmajority countries for 90 days.
The original order also called for Homeland Security and State department officials, along with the director of national intelligence, to review what information the government needs to fully vet would-be visitors and come up with a list of countries that can’t or won’t make the information available.
It said the government will give countries 60 days to start providing the information or citizens from those countries will be barred from travelling to the US. Even if Syrian refugees are no longer automatically rejected under the new order, the pace of refugees entering the US from all countries is likely to slow significantly.
That’s because even when the courts put Trump’s original ban on hold, they left untouched Trump’s 50,000-a-year refugee cap, a cut of more than half from the cap under the Obama administration. The US has already taken in more than 35,000 refugees this year, leaving less than 15,000 spots before hitting Trump’s cap, according to a US official.
That means that for the rest of this fiscal year, the number of refugees being let in a week will likely fall to a fraction of what it had been under the Obama administration’s cap of 110,000.
Earlier this month, the 9th Circuit Court of Appeals in San Francisco refused to reinstate Trump’s ban, unanimously rejecting the administration’s claim of presidential authority, questioning its motives and concluding that the order was unlikely to survive legal challenges.
Homeland Security Secretary John Kelly said in Munich at the weekend that Trump was working on a ‘‘streamlined’’ version of his executive order banning travel from the seven nations to iron out the difficulties that landed his first order in the courts.
Speaking at the Munich Security Conference about combating terrorism, Kelly said Trump’s original order was designed as a ‘‘temporary pause’’ to allow him to ‘‘see where our immigration and vetting system has gaps – and gaps it has – that could be exploited’’.
– AP