Revised travel ban takes effect
Less chaos expected under order, which tightens visa rules
WASHINGTON — A scaled-back version of President Donald Trump’s travel ban took effect Thursday evening, stripped of provisions that brought protests and chaos at airports worldwide in January yet still likely to generate a new round of court fights.
The new rules, the product of months of legal wrangling, aren’t so much an outright ban as a tightening of already-tough visa policies affecting citizens from six Muslim-majority countries. Refugees are covered, too.
Administration officials predicted that implementation, beginning at 6 p.m. MDT, would be orderly. Customs and Border Protection spokesman Dan Hetlage said his agency expected “business as usual at our ports of entry.”
Yet amid vows from immigration and refugee advocates to challenge the new requirements, the administration sometimes struggled to explain how the new requirements would make the United States safer.
Under the temporary rules, citizens from Syria, Sudan, Somalia, Libya, Iran and Yemen who already have visas will be allowed into the United States. But people from those countries who need new visas will now have to prove a close family relationship or an existing relationship with an entity like a school or business in the U.S.
It’s unclear to what degree the new rules will affect travel. Few people in most of the countries have the means for leisure travel, and those that do already face intensive screenings before being issued visas.
Still, human rights groups on Thursday girded for new legal battles. The American Civil Liberties Union, one of the groups challenging the ban, said the new criteria are “extremely restrictive,” ”arbitrary” in their exclusions and designed to “disparage and condemn Muslims.”
Much of the confusion in January, when Trump’s first ban took effect, resulted from travelers with previously approved visas being kept off flights or barred entry on arrival in the United States. Immigration officials were instructed Thursday not to block anyone with valid travel documents and otherwise eligible to visit the United States.
Trump, who made a tough approach to immigration a cornerstone of his election campaign, issued a ban on travelers from the six countries, plus Iraq, shortly after taking office in January. That ban also blocked refugees from any country.
Lower courts blocked the initial order and, later, a revised Trump order, which exempted Iraq, intended to overcome legal hurdles. The Supreme Court on Monday partly reinstated the revised ban but exempted travelers who could prove a “bona fide relationship” with a U.S. person or entity.