Donald Trump signed three executive orders on Saturday afternoon. One of these addressed lobbying, the second was on the structure of the National Security Council and Homeland Security. Trump then announced that his final executive order was “the plan to defeat the Islamic State in Iraq and Syria, in other words, ISIS.”
The contents aren’t clear, but that Trump would put the plan in an executive order seems both pointless—and more than mildly hypocritical for a man who spent eighteen months insisting that America shouldn’t give its enemies a clue about military actions.
As Trump stood to leave after the microscopically-brief photo op, he was asked about the ban on travel from Muslim nations. Trump’s response was that it was not a Muslim ban and that …
"You see it at the airports, it's working out very nicely"
“Very nicely,” if the goal was to hopelessly fragment families, strand people who were traveling on valid US visas, lock out the very people are are targeted by Trump’s “radical Islamic extremists” for helping US forces, and generally generate gridlock and confusion.
In other words … chaos.
President Trump’s executive order barring refugees and migrants from predominantly Muslim countries from entry into the United States rippled across the world on Saturday, causing widespread confusion, triggering outrage among immigrant advocates and leading to the detention at U.S. airports of people flying into the country.
The New York Times has the stories of some of the trapped, including.
Mr. Darweesh, a husband and father of three who worked for the United States military in Iraq for about a decade, was detained after arriving at Kennedy Airport on Friday night. He was granted a special immigrant visa on Jan. 20. When he filed for it, he said he had been directly targeted because of his work for the U.S. as an interpreter, engineer and contractor. ...
Mr. Saravi, a young scientist in Iran, had been scheduled to travel to Boston, where he was awarded a fellowship at Harvard to study cardiovascular medicine, according to Thomas Michel, the professor who was to supervise his research. Then the visas for Mr. Saravi and his wife were suspended, Professor Michel said.
The implementation of the order has also been chaotic, with cases of some family members passing into the country, while others in the same party have been locked out.
Volunteer organizations are working to free people from being trapped at airports or being shipped back into regions where their life is threatened.
The actual content of the Executive Orders that Trump signed on Saturday should be available for examination shortly. Also on Saturday, Trump spoke with Vladimir Putin with Russia fans Michael Flynn and Steve Bannon in the room, but it doesn’t appear that any of the orders rescinds US sanctions against Russia.
Protests are underway at many airports, with a vigil to begin Saturday evening at JFK.
