REVISED TRAVEL
Order said to cover 6 mainly Muslim nations
ban excludes Iraq, sources say.
WASHINGTON — President Donald Trump’s new immigration order will remove Iraq from the list of countries whose citizens face a temporary U.S. travel ban, American officials said, citing the latest draft in circulation.
Trump is expected to sign the executive order in the coming days.
Four officials said the Iraq decision came in response to pressure from the Pentagon and the State Department, which had urged the White House to reconsider including Iraq, given its key role in fighting the Islamic State militant group.
Citizens of six other predominantly Muslim countries — Iran, Libya, Somalia, Sudan, Syria and Yemen — will remain on the travel ban list, said the officials, who spoke on condition of anonymity because they weren’t authorized to discuss the order before it is signed. Those bans will be effective for 90 days, according to reports.
The new order includes other changes as well. The officials said the 12-page document no longer singles out Syrian refugees for an indefinite ban and instead includes them as part of a general, 120day suspension of new refugee admissions.
The officials also said the order won’t include any explicit exemption for religious minority groups in the countries targeted by the travel ban. Critics had accused the U.S. administration of adding such language to help Christians get into the United States while excluding Muslims.
The White House did not respond to a request for comment.
Trump signed his original executive order in late January. It caused confusion, panic and anger as some travelers were detained in U.S. airports before being sent back overseas and others were barred from boarding flights at foreign airports.
The federal government initially blocked U.S. greencard holders before offering those legal U.S. residents special permission to enter the country. It finally decided that the executive order didn’t apply to them.
The State Department provisionally revoked roughly 60,000 valid visas before a federal judge in Washington state blocked the government from carrying out the ban. The 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals upheld that decision.
Under the revised order, officials said, all existing visas will be honored.
The administration had planned to roll out the new executive order Wednesday but delayed it for unspecified reasons. It was unclear when Trump’s signing would happen. A White House official, who asked not to be identified as discussing the policy decision ahead of its announcement, said the rollout was delayed until at least Friday.
“When we have one, we’ll announce it,” White House spokesman Sean Spicer said Wednesday of a new order.
The new ban originally was scheduled to be released last week. The delays contrast with the rushed nature of the original order’s implementation, which Trump had said was necessary because “bad guys” would otherwise rush into the country.
On Tuesday, in his first address to a joint session of Congress, Trump defended his effort.
“We will shortly take new steps to keep our nation safe and to keep out those who would do us harm,” he said.
After Trump signed the original order, Iraqi Prime Minister Haider al-Abadi said he would consider reciprocal measures. Many Iraqi lawmakers urged the government to ban Americans from Iraq in response, despite the potential effects that might have on the anti-Islamic State fight.
Al-Abadi then met with Defense Secretary James Mattis in Baghdad and Vice President Mike Pence in Munich last month. Both discussions emphasized ways of strengthening cooperation.
“They’ve invited us into their country to help them,” Lt. Gen. Stephen Townsend, the top U.S. commander in Iraq, said Wednesday. “They are protecting us here, and we’re fighting this enemy that threatens all of our countries together. So I would prefer personally not to see anything that would reflect on that except that we have a very strong partnership.”
The Trump administration’s changes to the immigration order follow a report by intelligence analysts at the Homeland Security Department. The report concluded that citizenship is an “unreliable” threat indicator and that people from the seven countries affected by the travel ban have rarely been implicated in U.S.-based terrorism.
But in a statement Wednesday, the Justice Department said it had won convictions “against over 500 defendants for terrorism or terrorism-related charges in federal courts” and that a “review of that information revealed that a substantial majority of those convicted were born in foreign countries.”
A department spokesman declined to provide the raw data.