As a US diplomat, I helped circumvent Trump’s Muslim ban – then realised I was part of the problem
When I began working as a consular officer at the US embassy in Ankara, Turkey, I was at the beginning of what was supposed to be a 20-year diplomatic career. Maybe I didn’t love all of US foreign policy, but in my routine visa assignment I was deeply committed to treating everybody I interviewed fairly and playing my part in facilitating the American immigrant dream. Then, on 27 June 2017, Donald Trump issued orders to begin implementing the “Muslim ban”. My routine job had suddenly become deeply morally fraught and instead of blandly facilitating the American dream, I was denying it to people based on their faith.
My first instinct was to draft a resignation letter, but I didn’t immediately send it because it felt at the time like I was part of a nigh-unanimous institutional rejection of an illiberal policy. More than 1,000 US diplomats put their signatures on an internal dissent cable against the Muslim ban when it was proclaimed. My boss hated the ban, my boss’ boss hated the ban, and the dozens of US ambassadors summoned to the foreign ministries of Muslimmajority countries to explain the policy tried to disown it as much as they possibly could. When I pushed back as much as I could, I did so with the full support of my bosses and colleagues. But, and this is the most important part, we always did so within the regulations.
We wanted to get waivers and exceptions for every applicant possible, so we sounded out exactly what criteria for waiving the ban Washington would accept. (Family separation? Loss of a valued employee for an American business?) We found where the bar was, we created templates and standard operating procedures, and got to work slotting as many people as we could into them. Within a few months, the ban interviews were rote checklists rather than impassioned pleas for humanity. Every applicant we got who checked the boxes was a moral victory; every one who didn’t make it was tragic. But, hey, we got to tell ourselves that we tried. As time wore on, I realised that fighting for individual waivers and exemptions was resistance by pedantry. What I found myself engaging in was a deeply non-confrontational performance of virtue rather than an act of sabotage.
Joe Biden repealed the Muslim ban on the first day of his presidency. When secretary of state Antony Blinken informed us that the policy had ended, he declared that the ban was “a stain on our national conscience”. It was never said in as many words, but the implication was that because we managed the policy to optimise exemptions and because we felt bad about it, and because leadership repudiated the policy in retrospect, it meant that we weren’t implicated. That the issue was settled.
But it isn’t settled. The presidential proclamation repealing the Muslim ban did not surrender a single iota of the authority to implement future bans. It was only when the Muslim ban was finally over that I fully realised what I had been part of; we created another tool in the toolbox, a set of procedures and standards for processing travel bans, waivers and exemptions that could be put to literally any purpose. Our internal resistance was fundamentally morally agnostic because we fought within the technical bounds of policy implementation rather than the fact of its declaration.
I quit the US state department a few months later. I quit because, despite all of our efforts from within the system to fight against the Muslim ban, there is nothing stopping a future president from reinstating it, or something like it. Trump has outright promised to reinstate an expanded and harsher Muslim ban if re-elected. I am confident that junior US diplomats in the same position I was will be disgusted, will try to push back. They might even dust off some of the old templates I made. But they will only serve to make things run smoother next time. A certain proportion of Muslim immigrants will find waivers. Some – maybe thousands, maybe most – sadly won’t, but the people implementing the ban will be better positioned to repudiate another future “stain on our national conscience”.
Resistance that shaves off the rough edges of inhumane policy without reversing it is not resistance, it is complicity. As theorist Stafford Beer says: “The purpose of a system is what it does,” and an immigration system with a smoothly running Muslim ban that has generous provision for waivers and exemptions is still an immigration system that bans Muslims. I quit the US diplomatic corps because internal resistance to a racist and illiberal political project is a losing bargain.
Josef Burton is a former US diplomat who served in Turkey, India and Washington DC