The House Judiciary Committee on Wednesday voted 22-10 to advance the NO BAN Act, which would terminate impeached president Donald Trump’s Muslim ban, to the full House floor. Politico reports that the vote was split along party lines, with Democrats voting in favor of ending this discriminatory policy, and Republicans voting in favor of continued state-sanctioned discrimination against Muslims.
Advocates cheered the bill’s passage in committee, with the executive director of the civil rights organization Muslim Advocates, Farhana Khera, saying in a statement, “This historic bill could be the first ever passed by a chamber of Congress to specifically affirm the civil rights of American Muslims.” A hearing held by House Democrats last year on the NO BAN Act was believed to be the chamber’s first-ever hearing on Muslim civil rights.
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Advocates noted the urgent need for this legislation due to the fact that the Trump administration is expanding its ban to an additional six nations. Nimra Azmi, a staff attorney with Muslim Advocates, said during a press call this week, “Because of the expanded Muslim Ban, the total number of Muslims banned from the U.S. has increased from roughly 140 million to more than 320 million. And there are more than a million Americans who were born in these banned countries and still have family there.
“There is no reason, apart from discrimination, to tear these families apart,” Azmi continued. During the House hearing last year, Ismail Alghazali, a U.S. citizen, testified that his wife, Hend, and their two children, 1-year-old Khaled and 5-month-old Rahf, have been stuck in Yemen and unable to join him due to the ban. While he was there for Khaled’s birth, he had to return to the U.S. to financially support the family. Rahf was born after he left. “I’ve never even met my daughter,” he told legislators.
“Freedom of religion is a cornerstone of who we are as Americans. President Trump claims to be a champion of religious freedom while simultaneously discriminating against Muslims,” Maggie Siddiqi of the Faith and Progressive Policy Initiative at the Center for American Progress said in a statement received by Daily Kos. “The NO BAN Act helps our nation live up to its values. If passed, this bill will make sure the damage caused to communities and families by the president’s anti-Muslim bigotry doesn’t happen again.”
That is bigotry that Republicans continued to defend in the House Judiciary Committee hearing this week. Arizona’s Rep. Debbie Lesko had the gall to claim that the Muslim ban “has nothing to do with religion,” which the committee’s chair, Rep. Jerry Nadler, said was easily disproven by Trump’s own words. “The president got up and said, we will ban all Muslims from coming into this country until we figure out what the hell is going on, unquote,” he said.
Democrats must do the right thing and pass this legislation, and put all Republicans subservient to Trump on the record with their bigotry. “This needless suffering has not made us safer and instead furthers President Trump’s bigoted agenda of excluding Muslims, Africans, immigrants and other people of color from the story of America,” Khera said. “For the sake of these families, it is now time for the full U.S. House of Representatives to act quickly and pass the NO BAN Act.”