President Donald Trump has effectively banned the entry of Syrian refugees into the United States, suspended the overall refugee programme for four months and clamped a 90-day bar on the entry of people from seven Muslim-majority nations — Iran, Iraq, libya, Somalia, Sudan, Syria and Yemen.
Dubbing the tough measures a part of his “extreme vetting” plan to keep “radical Islamic terrorists” out of the United States, Trump signed a new executive order at the Pentagon on Friday, remarking, “We want to make sure we are not admitting into our country the very threats our soldiers are fighting overseas. We only want to admit those into our country who support our country and love deeply our people.”
Trump’s directive also slashes the number of refugees that the US will accept to 50,000 this fiscal year from the 110,000 that his predecessor Barack Obama had proposed. Indicating his plan would give priority to “persecuted Christians” from the Muslim-majority nations in future refugee approvals, Trump said in an interview: “We’re going to help them. They’ve been horribly treated.”
Some analysts expressed surprise over the exclusion of Pakistan, Afghanistan and Saudi Arabia from the scope of Trump’s executive order, given that the first two have been extensively scarred by terrorism, while the third (Saudi Arabia) was the home of 15 of 19 hijackers who carried out the 9/11 terrorist attack on the US in 2001.
Democrats and human rights groups lost little time to blast Trump’s new measures, denouncing them as discriminatory and unconstitutional. And the Council on American-Islamic Relations said it would file a lawsuit against the Government on behalf of at least 20 people affected by what it called the “Muslim Ban”. Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg said the nation ought to focus “on people who actually pose a threat”.
“Make no mistake — this is a Muslim ban,” said Kamala Harris, the newly-elected Indian-African-American Senator from California. The American Civil liberties Union said that “extreme vetting” was just a euphemism for discriminating against Muslims, adding that identifying specific countries and carving out exceptions ran counter to the constitutional principle banning the Government from either favouring or discriminating against particular
religions.
“Tears are running down the cheeks of the Statue of liberty tonight as a grand tradition of America, welcoming immigrants, that has existed since America was founded has been stomped upon,” Senate Democratic leader Chuck Schumer said in a statement. And Senator Chris Murphy commented, “Trump’s Muslim ban is a moral abomination.
It is fundamentally
un-American.”
In contrast, some Republican leaders promptly praised the executive action, saying Trump was following through on his campaign promise to prevent terrorists from entering the US. House Speaker Paul Ryan said in a statement: “President Trump is right to make sure we are doing everything possible to know exactly who is entering our country.”
While the entry of refugees from other nations has been frozen for 120 days, it is indefinite in the case of Syrian refugees and, according to Trump, will continue “until such time as I have determined that sufficient changes have been made to the (US Refugee Admissions Programme) to ensure that admission of Syrian refugees is consistent with the national interest”.
During the past fiscal year, the US accepted 84,995 refugees, including 12,587 people from Syria. The International Rescue Committee called Trump’s order a “harmful and hasty” decision that would affect thousands of innocent people, mostly women and children, awaiting resettlement to the United States.
“America has the strongest, most successful resettlement program in the world,” said David Miliband, head of the IRC. “Certified by successive administrations, the U.S. resettlement program makes it harder to get to the United States as a refugee than any other route.”