Former US President Donald Trump is set to reinstate and tighten the travel restrictions his previous administration put on citizens from Muslim countries if he is successful in the forthcoming US presidential elections. Trump has made a series of remarks about the policy throughout his campaign run and has repeatedly indicated he will put the ban back in place after Biden undid the legislation within a few days of coming to office in 2020.
“Total and complete shutdown of Muslims”
An obsession with US border control and Muslims in particular has long been a feature of Trump’s speeches and proposed strategies, as far back as December 2015, during the Republican primary, when he called for a “total and complete shutdown of Muslims entering the United States.” When he became President, he enacted an executive order stopping citizens from Iran, Libya, Somalia, Sudan, Syria, Yemen, and Iraq from entering the US for 90 days.
Trump tells a crowd that if he’s re-elected he will create a Muslim travel ban to keep “radical Islamic terrorists out of our country” because “we don’t want our buildings blown up.” pic.twitter.com/ZgEtpIJpZW
— Ian Miles Cheong (@stillgray) May 4, 2023
After challenges in the Federal Courts, a revised order was approved by the Supreme Court in 2018 and pushed even further to include non-Muslim North Korea and Venezuela too.
The travel ban is coming back.
Donald J. Trump
Telling voters in Iowa in early July 2024 that the reinstated ban would be “even bigger than before”, Trump has mooted the addition of Afghanistan to the list of non-grata countries. Speaking at Council Bluffs, a town of just over 60,000 inhabitants and over 90% white, Trump claimed that “Under the Trump administration, we imposed extreme vetting and put on a powerful travel ban to keep radical Islamic terrorists and jihadists out of our country. Well, how did that work out? We had no problem, right? They knew they couldn’t come here if they had that moniker. They couldn’t come here.”
An entire montage of Donald Trump saying that he wants to ban Muslims, and that he hates Islam itself.
— OJ Smoke (@OJ_Smoke_) July 4, 2024
Trump is only saying what they’re all secretly thinking.
Yet we still have naive Muslims who like Trump and defend him. pic.twitter.com/giEw9ZBLfd
“When I return to office,” Trump went on, “the travel ban is coming back even bigger than before and much stronger than before. We don’t want people blowing up our shopping centers. We don’t want people blowing up our cities and we don’t want people stealing our farms. So it’s not gonna happen.”
Domestic terror threat
A fact check reveals that white supremacist and homegrown terrorism is far more common in the US than “foreign” attacks and, as the US National Institute of Justice points out “domestic extremists continue to be responsible for most terrorist attacks in the United States.”
As a felon convicted of 34 counts of fraud, Trump could himself be denied entry to many countries, including Australia, Brazil, Canada, China, Great Britain, Japan, New Zealand, and South Africa.
But Trump has promised to “keep radical Islamic terrorists out of our country” and reinstate the ban which he reportedly likes to refer to as “beautiful” despite border experts’ view that constant changes to immigration rules do not help the system to work better.
“The legal immigration system is still struggling to get back on its feet after 2017-2020,” sayid Dara Lind, a senior fellow at the American Immigration Council, who went on “partly because of Covid but also because it’s really hard to keep a functioning policy system when policy keeps changing on a dime.”
