President Donald Trump’s
controversial ban on travelers from six Muslim-majority countries will expire on Sunday. The White House, though, is expected to issue another one.
WASHINGTON — Days before the expiration of President Donald Trump’s much-contested travel ban, the White House is reviewing a security report that aides say could serve as the basis of a new, and perhaps broader, version.
The classified report by the Department of Homeland Security, sent to the White House last week, is a study of the available security and intelligence information in countries worldwide, not just the six Muslim-majority nations subject to Trump’s order banning travel by their citizens to the U.S. That order expires Sunday.
Based on the findings, Trump could decide to keep the travel ban in place, or either limit or expand it, possibly before Sunday.
The order also stopped all refugee resettlement in the U.S. for 120 days, so that ban would continue in effect for roughly a month more. The Supreme Court in June had allowed the refugee ban to take effect, along with a revised travel ban for 90 days in the six specified nations.
David Lapan, spokesman for the Department of Homeland Security, said it was “certainly possible” that more countries could come under restrictions.
“It’s about the conditions in the countries and the quality of information, and not the political or religious factors,” he said.
“You have Muslim-majority countries that are in civil war, you have Muslimmajority countries that have major terrorism problems,” Lapan said. “You could have countries that were not majority-Muslim that would have the same problems.”
The White House declined to comment, but Trump, in a tweet after the London train explosion last week, made it clear that he would like even broader travel restrictions.
“The travel ban into the United States should be far larger, tougher and more specific — but stupidly, that would not be politically correct!” he tweeted.
White House national security adviser H.R. McMaster on ABC’s “This Week” on Sunday said a new travel ban would be a “first step in better screening” of who is trying to enter the country.
The security report provides an opening for the administration to try once again to reset its case for the ban, which has been under sustained attack in the federal courts ever since its helter-skelter rollout in the early days of Trump’s presidency.
On Jan. 27, a week after taking office, Trump signed an order banning entry to the U.S. from citizens of seven nations initially — Syria, Iran, Libya, Somalia, Sudan, Yemen and Iraq. Issued with scant notice to security agencies, the ban created confusion and protests at airports across the country before federal judges signed orders blocking its implementation.
On March 6, Trump signed a new order that dropped Iraq from the list but kept the ban in place for 90 days for the other six countries. The order instructed Homeland Security to conduct a “worldwide review” of security conditions to determine whether the U.S. could be confident that it could identify which travelers could pose a threat.
Lapan said it’s unlikely that countries like Syria would drop off the list. “It’s hard to say that would happen because conditions in those countries wouldn’t change that much,” he said.
Even after the ban was rewritten, and the president’s senior officials were telling reporters that the word “ban” was not accurate, Trump took to Twitter to insist it was a ban. He criticized the federal courts as well as his own Justice Department.
“The Justice Dept. should have stayed with the original Travel Ban, not the watered down, politically correct version,” he tweeted.
The Supreme Court is scheduled to take up the ban on Oct. 10, but that case might be moot if the administration once again replaces the order with a third version.