Analysts: Visit ban baseless

Draft report finds little 7-nation risk

WASHINGTON — Analysts at the Homeland Security Department’s intelligence arm found insufficient evidence that citizens of the seven Muslim-majority countries included in President Donald Trump’s travel ban pose a terror threat to the United States.

A draft document obtained by The Associated Press concludes that citizenship is an “unlikely indicator” of terrorism threats to the United States and that few people from the countries Trump listed in his travel ban, which he signed in late January, have carried out attacks or been involved in terrorism-related activities in the U.S. since Syria’s civil war started in 2011.

Trump cited terrorism concerns as the primary reason he signed the sweeping temporary travel ban, which also halted the U.S. refugee program. A federal judge in Washington state blocked the government from carrying out the order earlier this month. Trump said Friday that a new order would be announced soon. The administration has been working on a new version that could withstand legal challenges.

Homeland Security Department spokesman Gillian Christensen on Friday

did not dispute the report’s authenticity, but said it was not a final comprehensive review of the government’s intelligence.

“The document you’re referencing was commentary from a single intelligence source versus an official, robust document with thorough interagency sourcing,” Christensen said. “The … report does not include data from other intelligence community sources. It is incomplete.”

The Homeland Security Department report is based on unclassified information from Justice Department press releases on terrorism-related convictions and attackers killed in the act, State Department visa statistics, the 2016 Worldwide Threat Assessment from the U.S. intelligence community and the State Department Country Reports on Terrorism 2015.

The three-page report challenges Trump’s core claims. It said that of 82 people the government determined were inspired by a foreign terrorist group to carry out or try to carry out an attack in the United States, just over half were U.S. citizens born in the United States. The others were from 26 countries, led by Pakistan, Somalia, Bangladesh, Cuba, Ethiopia, Iraq and Uzbekistan. Of these, only Somalia and Iraq were among the seven nations included in the ban.

Of the other five nations, one person each from Iran, Sudan and Yemen was also involved in those terrorism cases, but none from Syria. It did not say if any were Libyan.

The report also found that terrorist organizations in Iran, Libya, Somalia and Sudan are regionally focused, while groups in Iraq, Syria and Yemen do pose a threat to the U.S.

The seven countries were included in a law President Barack Obama signed in 2015 that updated visa requirements for foreigners who had traveled to those countries.

Christensen said the countries were also selected in part because they lacked the ability to properly vet their citizens and don’t cooperate with U.S. efforts to screen people hoping to come to the U.S.

The report was prepared as part of an internal review Trump requested after his executive order was blocked by the 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals. It was drafted by staff of the Homeland Security Department’s Intelligence and Analysis branch at the direction of its acting leader, David Glawe.

White House spokesman Michael Short said this was not the full report that Trump had requested. He said he believes that “the intel community is combining resources to put together a comprehensive report using all available sources, not just open sources, and which is driven by data, not politics.”

Trump originally said the ban was necessary to overhaul the vetting system for refugees and would-be foreign visitors, saying that terrorists may try to exploit weaknesses to gain access to the United States. The order sparked chaos, outrage and widespread protests, with travelers detained at airports and panicked families searching for relatives.

But several courts quickly intervened and the 9th Circuit ultimately upheld a ruling blocking the ban and chalv

lenged the administration’s claim that it was motivated by terrorism fears.

On Thursday, the Justice Department turned over to the American Civil Liberties Union a list of 746 names of those who were held, in any capacity, because of the executive order during a 26½-hour stretch from Jan. 28-29.

That number is several times the number Trump cited in a tweet the week after the rollout of his travel ban.

“Only 109 people out of 325,000 were detained and held for questioning,” he wrote at the time.

A Department of Justice spokesman declined to comment. A White House spokesman did not immediately return a message seeking comment.

A Department of Homeland Security official said the difference in counts is likely attributable to officials taking different snapshots in time. As flights landed initially, the official said, 109 people were detained. But as more came in, the number swelled.

The ACLU had sought the list of 746 people as part of an effort to identify those whose travel was affected while that suspension was in place, particularly those who might have been removed from the country.

Exactly what happened to each of the 746 people also is unclear. Lee Gelernt, deputy director of the ACLU’s national Immigrants’ Rights Project, said that at a court hearing Friday, government lawyers indicated the majority were lawful permanent residents. Some might have been processed into the United States with relatively minor hassle, while others could have faced prolonged detainment or even more significant hardships.

Gelernt said the government initially turned over just a list of names, but they agreed on Friday to identify those who had made it into the country and those who had not. The government had been ordered to turn over a list of anyone who, from 9:37 p.m. on Jan. 28 to 11:59 p.m. on Jan. 29, had been “held, including being processed, by U.S. Customs and Border Protection pursuant to the [Executive Order].” The parties agreed not to make the list public. Gelernt said civil-liberties lawyers also had identified 10 people it believes should have been on the list but were not, and the government agreed to investigate why.

The government has offered conflicting numbers of people affected by the executive order before. Earlier this month, a Justice Department lawyer declared more than 100,000 visas had been revoked provisionally as a result of it, while the State Department said the figure was actually 60,000. Officials ultimately agreed on the State Department’s count. That figure, rather than the number detained or processed, is a more accurate assessment of the executive order’s impact, reflecting all those whose travel would be affected.