President Trump issued a presidential proclamation this weekend instituting a new “travel ban” that restricts entry to the United States for nationals of eight countries.
This new draft Trump’s travel ban may be the most confusing yet.
The president cites America’s inability to screen out terrorists as the justification for the ban. But such a ban would not have kept out the 9/11 hijackers or any terrorists since then, nor would it have prevented any terrorism deaths in decades.
Even if the new travel ban had been in place for decades, it would have only stopped five terrorists from entering the U.S. — and would have saved ZERO lives.
In Cato’s amicus brief for the Supreme Court case challenging his prior executive order banning travel from six countries, we criticized the ban as lacking a basis in the evidence regarding terrorism threats and terrorism vetting failures. The new order is even further divorced from threats of terrorism to the United States than the prior order.
The ban singles out nationals of Chad, Iran, Libya, North Korea, Syria, Venezuela, Somalia and Yemen. The purported basis for the proclamation is that most of these governments fail to share sufficient information about the identities of their nationals with U.S. agencies to, as the proclamation states, “adjudicate an application” for a visa by their nationals. This premise is flawed. Under immigration law, the U.S. government doesn’t need to obtain any information on visa applicants merely to process an application. That’s because applicants bear the burden of proof in the visa process. If they cannot prove their identity and eligibility, visa adjudicators can simply deny them on an individual basis.
This means that the travel ban exists solely to deny visa adjudicators the opportunity to review each application — even though there no evidence that visa adjudicators aren’t doing their jobs.
The president’s most recent proclamation is nothing more than a political document, not one with any legal or national security basis.