Last week, Trump’s executive order banning Muslims from selected countries from entering the U.S. captured headlines around the world. The Muslim ban provoked outrage from protesters, despair among refugees, general indignity, and sanctuary offers from Canada’s Justin Trudeau. Along with other xenophobic promises such as the Mexican border wall, the Muslim ban surely energizes his political base. However, is there more to these plans than meets the eye?
Last week, Trump’s executive order banning Muslims from selected countries from entering the U.S. captured headlines around the world. The Muslim ban provoked outrage from protesters, despair among refugees, general indignity, and sanctuary offers from Canada’s Justin Trudeau. Along with other xenophobic promises such as the Mexican border wall, the Muslim ban surely energizes his political base. However, is there more to these plans than meets the eye?
This executive order partially fulfills Trump’s campaign promise of “a total and complete shutdown of Muslims entering the United States.” Currently, travelers are banned from Iran, Iraq, Libya, Somalia, Sudan, Syria and Yemen. Americans have almost never experienced domestic terror perpetrated by citizens of any of these countries. However, the Muslim ban still allows citizens of some majority Muslim countries to enter, notably Saudi Arabia, Egypt, Turkey, and the UAE, although citizens from those countries have perpetrated attacks on American soil, such as on 9/11. Why are those citizens still allowed to enter? Perhaps because Trump has business interests in those countries, and not the others. Follow the money, as they say.
While Trump devised the Muslim ban to reassure his fearful followers that he would protect them from terrorists, there have been few terror attacks to worry about. Instead, we’re excluding people who would make noteworthy contributions to our country. People like Seyed Soheil Saeedi Saravi. Saravi, the top student at Tehran University, planned to join a cardiovascular research lab at Harvard. Fellow Iranian Samira Asgari, also denied entry, came to research tuberculosis cures at Brigham and Women’s Hospital. Hameed Khalid Darweesh, an Iraqi interpreter who risked his life to work with the American military, was also detained and handcuffed. Another military interpreter, a Yazidi (a persecuted, pre-Islamic religious group) named Khalas, already in the U.S., was unable to reunite with his wife who was coming from Iraq. These, along with people trying desperately to escape ISIS/ISIL, are the people we’re excluding from our country. Nice job.
From refugee to #Marine. @USMC Cpl Ali J. Mohammed takes the fight to the doorstep of those who cast his family out.https://t.co/oSXWGrzsL7 pic.twitter.com/UVlWsaESic
— U.S. Dept of Defense (@DeptofDefense) January 25, 2017
A ban on refugees would also have excluded people like Ali J. Mohammed.
The battle over the Muslim ban is already playing out in the courts. Federal judge Ann M. Donnelly ruled that sending the refugees home would cause them “irreparable harm.” This order doesn’t force the government to allow those who have not yet begun their travel to enter the country. Almost simultaneously, another judge, Leonie M. Brinkema, issued a temporary restraining order against removing green card holders detained at Dulles International Airport. For their part, the Department of Homeland Security plans to keep on keeping on, with or without these court orders. We now have a potential Constitutional crisis even worse than Nixon was ready to cause.
There may be more to the Muslim ban than just money, perceived safety, and xenophobia, though. Trump already stated his preference for Christian refugees. Some Christian groups that help resettle refugees spoke out strongly against religious discrimination in which refugees we choose to accept. However, there’s a strong undercurrent in our culture regarding America being “a Christian country.” How that sentiment relates to the Muslim ban and other aspects of the Trump presidency is a matter I’ll examine in the next post in this series.
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