Lawfare: Malevolence Tempered by Incompetence: Trump’s Horrifying Executive Order on Refugees and Visas by Benjamin Wittes (January 28, 2017)
What’s more, the document also takes steps that strike me as utterly orthogonal to any relevant security interest. If the purpose of the order is the one it describes, for example, I can think of no good reason to burden the lives of students individually suspected of nothing who are here lawfully and just happen to be temporarily overseas, or to detain tourists and refugees who were mid-flight when the order came down. I have trouble imagining any reason to raise questions about whether green card holders who have lived here for years can leave the country and then return. Yes, it’s temporary, and that may lessen the costs (or it may not, depending on the outcome of the policy review the order mandates), but temporarily irrational is still irrational.
Put simply, I don’t believe that the stated purpose is the real purpose. This is the first policy the United States has adopted in the post-9/11 era about which I have ever said this. It’s a grave charge, I know, and I’m not making it lightly. But in the rational pursuit of security objectives, you don’t marginalize your expert security agencies and fail to vet your ideas through a normal interagency process. You don’t target the wrong people in nutty ways when you’re rationally pursuing real security objectives.
When do you do these things? You do these things when you’re elevating the symbolic politics of bashing Islam over any actual security interest. You do them when you’ve made a deliberate decision to burden human lives to make a public point. In other words, this is not a document that will cause hardship and misery because of regrettable incidental impacts on people injured in the pursuit of a public good. It will cause hardship and misery for tens or hundreds of thousands of people because that is precisely what it is intended to do.
To be sure, the executive order does not say anything as crass as: “Sec. 14. Burdening Muslim Lives to Make Political Point.” It doesn’t need to. There’s simply no reason in reading it to ignore everything Trump said during the campaign, during which he repeatedly called for a ban on Muslims entering the United States.
Washington Post: Judge halts deportations as refugee ban causes worldwide furor by Jerry Markon, Emma Brown and Katherine Shaver (January 29, 2017) -
A federal judge in New York blocked deportations nationwide late Saturday of those detained on entry to the United States after an executive order from President Trump targeted citizens from seven predominantly Muslim countries.
Judge Ann Donnelly of the U.S. District Court in Brooklyn granted a request from the American Civil Liberties Union to stop the deportations after determining that the risk of injury to those detained by being returned to their home countries necessitated the decision.
Minutes after the judge’s ruling in New York, another came in Alexandria when U.S. District Judge Leonie Brinkema issued a temporary restraining order to block for seven days the removal of any green-card holders being detained at Dulles International Airport. Brinkema’s action also ordered that lawyers have access to those held there because of the ban.
Time: Republicans Begin to Break With President Trump by Philip Elliott/Indian Wells, Calif,Alex Altman (January 29, 2017) -
By Sunday evening, more than a dozen GOP members of Congress had spoken out against Trump’s executive order on immigration. Among them were an array of the party’s most influential figures. The top Republican in the Senate, Mitch McConnell, said the United States should not implement a religious test. Sen. Rob Portman of Ohio said the plan to strengthen vetting of refugees was itself not vetted. And the political and policy groups led by Charles and David Koch offered their first public criticism of Trump, whose candidacy the billionaire brothers found so unpalatable they sat out the 2016 election.
The wave of criticism marks the end of a startlingly brief honeymoon period for a new President who has been in office for scarcely a week, and even set the White House on defense as it backtracked on the ban applying to green-card holders. And while much of the blowback was driven by Trump’s immigration orders, the controversial plans he has on the horizon suggest the rest of his term could be just as rocky.
The emerging rifts come amid mass protests in cities around the U.S. against an executive order that would block millions of people from entering the United States. Legal permanent U.S. residents were detained at airports, refugees were trapped en route to the United States and judges from coast to coast stepped in to stop the unprecedented White House action. The chaos knocked the White House back on its heels and prompted Trump on Sunday night to release a defense of the policy.
Washington Post: President Trump’s refugee ban is an affront to American values by WaPo Editorial Board (January 29, 2017) -
Syria’s civil war has forced about 4.8 million people to flee to neighboring countries, and 1 million are seeking asylum in Europe. Mr. Trump callously and without evidence declared that Syrian refugees are “detrimental to the interests of the United States,” although in fact the relatively small number who have come to the United States have proven overwhelmingly positive. Mr. Trump’s four-month ban on refugees from these predominantly Muslim nations was accompanied by an instruction to prioritize refugee claims made by religious minorities facing persecution, chiefly Christians whose communities have suffered greatly over many decades. We think there’s a legitimate place in refugee policy for favoring persecuted minorities, but favoring one faith while blocking people from another is demeaning to all and runs counter to the basic tenet that the United States does not discriminate by religion.
Mr. Trump claims these seven countries might produce terrorists who “will use any means possible to enter the United States.” The country that supplied 15 of the 19 hijackers in the 9/11 attacks is Saudi Arabia, which is not on Mr. Trump’s list. Vigilance is always called for, but refugees to the United States are as a whole grateful and hard-working and have not resorted to terrorism. Cutting them off not only punishes the most vulnerable, but may encourage terrorist recruitment and violence.
Mr. Trump’s actions pander to rage and fear of outsiders. Yet our long history shows these fears are unfounded. The diversity, experience and striving of immigrants and refugees have immeasurably strengthened the United States; outbursts of anti-alien sentiment have only weakened it.
Washington Post: Officials worry that U.S counterterrorism defenses will be weakened by Trump actions by Greg Miller and Missy Ryan (January 29, 2017) -
Through inflammatory rhetoric and hastily drawn executive orders, the administration has alienated allies, including Iraq, provided propaganda fodder to terrorist networks that frequently portray U.S. involvement in the Middle East as a religious crusade, and endangered critical cooperation from often-hidden U.S. partners — whether the leader of a mosque in an American suburb or the head of a Middle East intelligence service.
An executive order — issued Friday and titled “Protecting the Nation from Foreign Terrorist Entry Into the United States” — bans entry to people from a list of Muslim-majority nations including Iraq, where U.S. military and intelligence agencies have for years relied on cooperation from Iraqi and Kurdish authorities, not to mention thousands of individual translators and contractors.
“Ultimately, we fear this executive order will become a self-inflicted wound in the fight against terrorism,” Republican Sens. Lindsey O. Graham (S.C.) and John McCain (Ariz.) said Sunday in a statement. “This executive order sends a signal, intended or not, that America does not want Muslims coming into our country. That is why we fear this executive order may do more to help terrorist recruitment than improve our security.”
Politico: Hill staffers secretly worked on Trump's immigration order by Rachael Bade, Jake Sherman and Josh Dawsey (January 30, 2017)
Senior staffers on the House Judiciary Committee helped Donald Trump's top aides draft the executive order curbing immigration from seven Muslim-majority nations, but the Republican committee chairman and party leadership were not informed, according to multiple sources involved in the process.
The news of their involvement helps unlock the mystery of whether the White House consulted Capitol Hill about the executive order, one of many questions raised in the days after it was unveiled on Friday. It confirms that the small group of staffers were among the only people on Capitol Hill who knew of the looming controversial policy.
* * *
It’s extremely rare for administration officials to circumvent Republican leadership and work directly with congressional committee aides. But the House Judiciary Committee has some of the most experienced staffers when it comes to immigration policy.
GOP leaders received no advance warning or briefings from the White House or Judiciary staff on what the executive order would do or how it would be implemented — briefings they still had not received as of Sunday night. Leaders including Speaker Paul Ryan (R-Wis.) and Majority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.) only saw the final language when reporters received it Friday night, according to multiple Hill sources.
Rather, Republicans on the Hill spent the entire weekend scrambling to find out what was going on, who was involved and how it was that they were caught so flat-footed.
"Their coordination with the Hill was terrible," said one senior GOP source on the Hill, who seemed flabbergasted that congressional Republicans didn’t receive talking points from the White House on the executive order until late Saturday night, about 24 hours after President Donald Trump signed it. “We didn't see the final language until it was actually out.”
Washington Post: Questions multiply over Bannon's role in Trump administration by Karen DeYoung (January 30, 2017)
President Trump's elevation of his chief political strategist to a major role in national security policy, and a White House order banning refugees from certain Muslim-majority countries from U.S. entry, appeared to come together as cause and effect over the weekend.
Stephen Bannon — whose nationalist convictions and hard-line oppositional view of globalism have long guided Trump — was directly involved in shaping the controversial immigration mandate, according to several people familiar with the drafting who requested anonymity because they were not authorized to speak publicly.
The order, which has ignited sweeping domestic and international backlash, came without the formal input of Trump's National Security Council, the committee of top national security aides designed to ensure the president examines all policy issues from different perspectives.
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