Trump to sign revised travel ban
PRESIDENT Trump is planning to sign an updated version of his controversial executive order banning travel from certain predominantly Muslim countries sometime this week, administration officials say.
While this plan is subject to change, the revised order could be signed as soon as yesterday, CNN reported on Saturday. Initially, the president planned to sign the order last Wednesday, but pushed it back in the wake of his widely well-received joint address to Congress.
“We want the (executive order) to have its own ‘moment,’” a senior administration official reportedly told CNN.
The original order, signed January 27, had temporarily blocked citizens of seven predominantly Muslim countries – Iraq, Iran, Syria, Somalia, Sudan, Libya and Yemen – and all refugees from entering the United States. The order, now frozen by the courts, was met with widespread backlash from both liberal and conservative critics who denounced it as discriminatory, unconstitutional, and, ultimately, a hindrance in the fight against the so-called Islamic State. As Trevor Bach reported for The Christian Science Monitor in January:
The White House is reportedly aiming to alleviate some of these concerns with revisions to the order. The updated order will reportedly exempt current visa holders and legal permanent residents, and will not include an exception for religious minorities.
The new order will also likely not impose a blanket ban on those from Iraq – a move reportedly supported by Secretary of State Rex Tillerson, Secretary of Defense James Mattis, national security adviser H.R. McMaster, and Homeland Security Secretary James Kelly, according to CNN. Critics of the initial ban argued that the inclusion of Iraq could be detrimental to cooperation between the US and Iraq in fighting the Islamic State, as Taylor Luck reported for the Monitor in February:
“The policy on the surface, and perhaps under the surface, is anti-Muslim [and] makes it hard for any Muslim country to be an open partner with the US,” Clint Watts, a senior fellow at the Philadelphia-based Foreign Policy Research Institute and a former FBI special agent, told the Monitor at the time. “At a time when even the Trump administration is reluctant to deploy troops in the region, it really limits the options on the counterterrorism playing field.”
But removing Iraq from the list of barred countries could raise more questions about the necessity of the order, and ultimately weaken the administration’s argument that the ban is a necessary measure to protect the United States from terror attacks.
The ban will not go into effect immediately when it is signed, sources familiar with the situation told the Post.— Yahoonews.