President Donald Trump has wasted no time in enacting his anti-immigration agenda, signing executive orders aimed at achieving his signature policy goal of cutting the number of documented and undocumented immigrants in the US.
Since his inauguration on Monday, Mr Trump has declared a national emergency at the southern border, sent troops to stop migrants crossing from Mexico, and is trying to end birthright citizenship, even though it is enshrined in the US Constitution. He has also halted the nation's refugee resettlement programme, and closed a task force that would reunite families who were deliberately separated during his first term.
Mr Trump also signed an executive order that immigration experts and civil rights groups say creates the basis to reinstate a travel ban on people from Muslim or Arab countries.
“This policy buries the potential for a new Muslim ban that purports to be about global terrorism and national security,” said Austin Kocher, an expert on immigration policy. “Whether or not the policy says it, it's going to focus on Muslim individuals or Muslim majority countries.”
Entitled “Protecting the United States from foreign terrorists and other national security and public safety threats", the order gives the State Department, the Department of Justice and other federal agencies 60 days to identify countries whose vetting and screening processes are “so deficient as to warrant a partial or full suspension on the admission of nationals from those countries".
On Mr Trump's first day in office in 2017, he ordered the first version of the so-called Muslim travel ban. The move abruptly stranded hundreds of travellers already in mid-air whose visas became void, and created chaos at airports. The measure was challenged in court and had to be amended several times, until the US Supreme Court upheld the last version in 2018. It affected nationals from Iran, Iraq, Libya, Somalia, Sudan, Syria and Yemen.
In 2021, on his first day in office, then-president Joe Biden revoked the ban, fulfilling his own campaign promise.
Mr Kocher says the order, signed on Monday, is “more robust” and probably more difficult to challenge in court.
“It's basically extreme vetting for everyone,” he told The National. “But also, Trump is telling the major agencies: 'You do some research and give me a list of countries that you think we shouldn't ever allow people from.'”
Experts say this order goes beyond the 2017 ban by adding language that would deny US visas to people who “bear hostile attitudes toward its citizens, culture, government, institutions or founding principles".
The American-Arab Anti-Discrimination Committee denounced the new order, saying it relies on the same justifications used under Mr Trump's initial ban and created an even “wider latitude to use ideological exclusion to deny visa requests and remove" people who are already in the country.
David Bier, director of immigration studies at the Cato Institute, said the order's broad language and the fact that it does not list specific countries is deliberate.
“There was probably some debate about how broad they wanted to have the ban,” Mr Bier said, “and they wanted to give themselves a week or so to kind of weigh in on how many countries they are going to be targeting with this.”
During his campaign, Mr Trump said he would reimpose travel bans on people from Gaza, Syria, Somalia, Yemen and Libya, and “anywhere else that threatens our security".
The White House has not immediately responded to a request for comment.
“President Trump took historic action on his first day in the Oval Office, signing 10 executive orders to secure our homeland, secure our southern border, and launched the largest mass deportation operation in American history,” White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt told Newsmax on Thursday.
Officials told The National that during meetings with Muslim and Arab voters in Michigan, surrogates of Mr Trump had promised there would be no Muslim ban, although he did say he would sign an executive order that would emphasise “extreme vetting” on certain nationalities.
The ADC and other civil rights groups say they have not yet determined if they will challenge the order in court, and have set up a legal hotline for people to call if they are affected by it.
The National Iranian-Americans Council said a ban on Iranian nationals could “conceivably be announced any day through March", and could affect more than 40,000 people who have been granted visas over the past four years.
