Washington, D.C. — Today, the Trump administration announced the expansion of its so-called Muslim ban, adding six countries to the seven that already populate the list. Under the ban, immigrant visas will no longer be available to nationals from Eritrea, Kyrgyzstan, Myanmar, and Nigeria, and nationals from Sudan and Tanzania will no longer be permitted to participate in the diversity visa program.
President Donald Trump timed the announcement to coincide with the three-year anniversary of the chaotic rollout of his first Muslim ban, raising serious questions about whether the new ban is being adopted to serve an important national interest or merely as a destructive promotional stunt. And while the administration is saying that banned individuals will be able to request waivers, there is ample reason to believe that the waiver process is a total sham.
Tom Jawetz, vice president of Immigration Policy at the Center for American Progress, issued the following statement:
With a wink and a nod, the Supreme Court in 2017 granted Trump the authority to set immigration policy based upon his own personal biases. With today’s new travel ban, we see Trump exercising that newly minted authority to ban thousands of nationals from six additional countries from entering the United States. Having already turned a blind eye to the patently anti-Muslim animus behind the third iteration of the Muslim ban—the first two of which were even more clearly illegal—it is hard to imagine that the court will now balk at Trump banning Nigerians from immigrating to the United States just a couple of years after he expressed the bigoted view that once Nigerians enter the United States, they will never “go back to their huts.”
It is time for Congress to take up and pass H.R. 2214, the NO BAN Act, to override the president’s discriminatory and dangerous executive actions and to put genuine safeguards in place in order to prevent future abuses by this or any subsequent president.
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For more information or to speak with an expert, please contact Claudia Montecinos at [email protected] or 202-481-8145.