[Promoted by Meteor Blades]
Trump’s pointless and cruel effort to ban Muslims from entering our country is more than an exercise in xenophobic stupidity. It’s also another example of his sheer incompetence. As Pro-Publica points out in an article written last night [and confirmed by the Department of Homeland Security this morning], the vague wording of the order could actually bar the return of about a half-million legal aliens from personal or business trips abroad, whether to visit their relatives in their home country or for any other reason:
[I]ts effects could extend well beyond preventing newcomers from Iran, Iraq, Libya, Somalia, Sudan and Yemen, from entering the U.S., lawyers consulted by ProPublica said. It’s also expected to have substantial effects on hundreds of thousands of people from these countries who already live in the U.S. under green cards or on temporary student or employee visas.
Since the order’s travel ban applies to all “aliens” — a term that encompasses anyone who isn’t an American citizen — it could bar those with current visas or even green cards from returning to the U.S. from trips abroad, said Stephen Legomsky, a former chief counsel to the U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services under President Obama.
“It’s extraordinarily cruel,” he said.
The only explicit exemptions from the ban are those who hold diplomatic visas. There is no exception made, for example, for students or employees who already have the perfect right to live here indefinitely under their green cards or on visas:
About 25,000 citizens from the seven countries specified in Trump’s ban have been issued student or employment visas in the past three years, according to Department of Homeland Security reports.
On top of that, almost 500,000 people from the seven countries have received green cards in the past decade, allowing them to live and work in the United States indefinitely. Legally speaking, green card holders are considered aliens.
Saturday, Jan 28, 2017 · 5:03:44 PM +00:00 · Meteor Blades
Update: Gillian Christensen, acting Department of Homeland Security spokeswoman, said on Saturday in an email to Reuters: "It will bar green card holders. Trump’s executive order means that green card holders from Iran, Iraq, Libya, Somalia, Sudan, Syria, and Yemen who are now on trips abroad cannot return to the United States for 90 days.
So people with jobs, families, friends and property in the U.S., people legally entitled to be here, are now subject to being barred from re-entry simply because of their “alien” status and the fact that they happen to come from seven different countries (including Iraq, whose society the U.S. essentially decimated, prompting the outflow of refugees in the first place).
It’s hard to overstate the horror of being arbitrarily “banished” from your home with only the clothes in your suitcase and on your back, in some unfriendly foreign airport, simply because the president’s chief adviser who authored the language of the order is too incompetent and ideologically blind to understand its implications, and the president is too much of an ignorant buffoon to ask. That is what we are dealing with here:
If applied literally, this provision would bar even those visitors who had made temporary trips abroad, for example, a student who went home on winter break and is now returning,” Legomsky said on Friday evening executive order.
In addition to destroying America’s image abroad, the rank clumsiness of this action is not only going to harm individuals, but also American business. Google has already slammed the policy and issued an urgent warning to 100 of its foreign-born employees currently out of the country to get back to the U.S. home (if they can). But it may already be too late for some. According to the BBC:
There have already been reports of "green card" holders, who are allowed to work in the US, being prevented from getting on flights. However, green cards are not specifically mentioned in the executive order.
Because the United States is now being run by a clueless child.
UPDATE: The Department Of Homeland Security has confirmed that the ban applies to green card holders:
People holding so-called green cards, making them legal permanent U.S. residents, are included in President Donald Trump's executive action temporarily barring people from seven Muslim-majority countries from entering the United States, a Department of Homeland security spokeswoman said on Saturday.
"It will bar green card holders," Gillian Christensen, acting Department of Homeland Security spokeswoman, said in an email.