Article by Audrey Thibert

In 2017, President Donald Trump enacted a drastic and unprecedented travel ban targeting Muslim-majority countries, halting immigration from countries such as Iran and Somalia and blocking Syrian refugees from resettlement in the United States. Despite initial court injunctions temporarily blocking the order, a revised version of the ban gained Supreme Court approval in a 5-4 decision, and the travel ban went into effect.

For the following years of the Trump administration, families were separated and unable to reunite under what Trump called a “complete and total shutdown of Muslims entering the United States.” When President Joe Biden assumed office, he rescinded the ban, allowing families to reunite and remain together.

However, with Trump’s return to power, fears of discriminatory and violent immigration policies have reignited. In his first week in office, he signed an executive order titled “Protecting the United States from Foreign Terrorists and other National Security and Public Safety Threats.” The ban aims to strengthen national security and protect Americans from immigrants who “exploit the immigration laws for malevolent purposes.”

The new executive order gives U.S. officials 60 days to assess the internal vetting protocols of other countries. If they determine a country’s vetting process is “so deficient,” they can recommend suspending immigration from that country. The executive order also aims to deport foreigners who entered the United States illegally after Biden’s rescission of the ban.

This push for immigration control has caused many to fear its ramifications on Muslim communities, domestic and abroad. The American-Arab Anti-Discrimination Committee warns that the U.S. government has vested itself with “wider latitude to use ideological exclusion” in rejecting visa applications and deporting foreigners in the United States. The broad language grants wide discretion to officials to deport anyone who holds, or is perceived to hold, a belief deemed threatening. Increased power to define and act on what constitutes a threatening ideology leads to widespread discrimination and abuse of power where individuals are targeted because of the administration’s political motives — not because they are true threats to national security.

In May of last year, during his presidential campaign, Trump stated: “When I’m president, we will not allow our colleges to be taken over by violent radicals, and if you come here from a violent country and try to bring jihadism, or anti-Americanism, or antisemitism to our campuses, we will immediately deport you. You’ll be out of that school.” This rhetoric only intensifies the growing wave of anti-Arab and anti-Muslim hate that has spiked across campuses nationwide. This new Muslim ban isn’t just being used as a means to keep certain people from coming into the country, but also to target and expel individuals based on their identities and ideologies.

The executive order for the new travel ban mandates that immigrants admitted under Biden’s administration must be checked and are susceptible to deportation based on any grounds deemed valid under the new order. One such basis is ensuring that immigrants “do not advocate for, aid, or support designated foreign terrorists.”

Pro-Israeli groups and politicians often equate pro-Palestinian students with Hamas or terrorists, which threatens student protesters on H1B visas who can be deported with the introduction of this ideological screening. Trump’s plan to deport protestors serves as an unprecedentedly significant move to decrease on-campus demonstrations as well as the presence of foreigners in the United States.

During his last presidency, Trump’s administration targeted Middle Eastern studies departments at U.S. universities, claiming that they promoted Islamic extremism. In 2019, the Department of Education launched an investigation into federally funded programs that focused on Middle Eastern and Islamic studies, criticizing them for indoctrinating students with views sympathetic to radical ideologies.

The potential effects on NYU are significant. In the 2023-2024 school year, NYU welcomed over 27,000 international students to study at its variety of campuses across the globe, with about 2% from the Middle East and North Africa, 63% from East and Southeast Asia and 18.76% from central and South Asia. According to the Islamic Center at NYU, over 3,000 Muslim students use its space and participate in organized events such as those hosted by the Muslim Student Association. Many of these students now face heightened risks due to their immigration status and political activism.

In the last year, hundreds of NYU students participated in pro-Palestinian protests outside of the Stern School of Business, with more than 150 people getting arrested in April 2024. For students who protested while on student visas, their ability to continue doing so under a new Trump administration is now increasingly complicated as they may face deportation threats.

Muslim and pro-Palestinian students are not the only groups to be targeted. Chinese students on student visas have been urged to remain in the United States for their spring semester due to fears of being unable to return if they go home. ICE raids targeting Latinx communities have already occurred in many metropolitan areas, including in Atlanta, Chicago and New York City. The imminent threat of deportation for many has become a focal point of concern, leading civil rights organizations and lawyers to work overtime to counter Trump’s bigoted policies.

In the face of rising anti-Arab and Muslim hate on campuses nationwide, NYU must act decisively to protect its student body. The university should provide resources to help students navigate the visa process and ensure protections for student protestors. NYU must also supply as much vital information to its students as possible, including clearly outlining the protection of student protestors, Arab and Muslim students and Middle Eastern and Islamic Studies departments. This, combined with a public statement denouncing these xenophobic policies, would be a good start to approaching the problem.

Source: Washington Square News

Civil rights advocates in the United States are raising the alarm over a directive signed by President Donald Trump that they say lays the groundwork for another travel ban targeting Muslim-majority countries.

The executive order, released on Monday, may also be used to target foreign nationals who are already in the US legally and crack down on international students who advocate for Palestinian rights, experts say.

Deepa Alagesan, a lawyer at the International Refugee Assistance Project (IRAP), an advocacy group, said the new order is “bigger and worse” than the “xenophobic” travel ban that Trump imposed on several Muslim-majority countries in 2017 during his first term.

“The worst part of it now, it’s looking to not just ban people outside the US entering the US, but also to use these same rationales as a basis to get people out of the US,” Alagesan told Al Jazeera.

The new order directs administration officials to compile a list of nations “for which vetting and screening information is so deficient as to warrant a partial or full suspension on the admission of nationals from those countries”.

It goes further, however. It calls for identifying the number of citizens who entered the US from those countries since 2021 — during Joe Biden’s presidency — and collecting “relevant” information about their “actions and activities”.

The White House then orders “immediate steps” to deport foreign citizens from those countries “whenever information is identified that would support the exclusion or removal”.

Trump’s executive order also says the administration must ensure that foreign citizens, including those in the US, “do not bear hostile attitudes” towards American citizens, culture or government and “do not advocate for, aid, or support designated foreign terrorists”.

Advocates call order ‘scary’

Alagesan warned that the decree, dubbed “Protecting the United States from Foreign Terrorists and Other National Security and Public Safety Threats”, could inflict more harm on immigrant families than the 2017 travel restrictions, known collectively as the “Muslim ban”.

She said the order’s vague language is “scary” because it appears to give US agencies broad authority to recommend actions against people whom the administration seeks to target.

“At its core, it’s just another method to keep people out, to get people out, to break up families, to incite fear, to make sure that people know that they are not welcome and that the government will bring its force to bear against them,” Alagesan told Al Jazeera.

Other advocacy groups have also decried the order since its publication.

The American-Arab Anti-Discrimination Committee (ADC) said the decree goes further than the 2017 “Muslim ban” by giving the government “wider latitude to use ideological exclusion” to deny visas and remove people from the US.

“ADC calls on the Trump administration to stop stigmatizing and targeting entire communities, which only sows division,” the group said in a statement.

“America’s promise of freedom of speech and expression — a principle that President Trump himself has long highlighted — now stands in stark contradiction to his new executive order.”

The Muslim Public Affairs Council also cautioned in a statement that enhancing vetting measures for specific countries risks “functioning as a de facto Muslim ban under the guise of security protocols”.

Maryam Jamshidi, a professor at the University of Colorado Law School, said the order appears to revive the travel ban from Trump’s first term, while pushing a right-wing agenda in the broader culture wars.

Parts of the decree also specifically target Palestinians and Palestinian rights supporters, Jamshidi added.

“The right is very invested in continuing this notion that foreigners, people who are Black, brown, Muslim — not white Judeo-Christian, effectively — are threatening ‘real Americans’.”

Jamshidi also said it is not clear how the order would go about deporting people, noting that it is not established whether the immigration law cited gives the administration authority to remove foreign nationals.

The decree relies on a section of the Immigration and Nationality Act that gives the president power to restrict entry to the US for “any class of aliens” — but not to remove people already here.

“This is probably not a blanket deportation charge,” Jamshidi said. But she warned that the order could lead to further scrutiny against people from those countries and deter political activities — especially Palestinian solidarity — that could be perceived as running afoul of the administration’s guidelines.

Efforts to deport student activists

The order directs US officials to make recommendations to “protect” citizens from foreign nationals “who preach or call for sectarian violence, the overthrow or replacement of the culture on which our constitutional Republic stands, or who provide aid, advocacy, or support for foreign terrorists”.

Jamshidi said the language is “certainly about foreign nationals, including foreign students who are participating in Palestine advocacy”.

With pro-Israel politicians often calling campus activists “pro-Hamas”, Jamshidi said Trump’s edict could be used to target Palestinian rights advocates who are in the US on student visas.

Both Trump and Secretary of State Marco Rubio have previously called for deporting international students.

As Palestinian solidarity protests swept the country’s universities following the outbreak of the war on Gaza, Israel’s supporters, especially Republicans, painted student demonstrators as a threat to campus safety.

Rubio led a Senate letter to the Biden administration in October 2023, calling for the removal of international students who participated in protests in support of Palestinians.

The letter drew parallels between student protesters and the 9/11 attackers. It cited “lessons learned on September 11, 2001, when terrorists, many of whom were studying in the United States or had overstayed visas, carried out the deadliest attack on American soil”.

“Sadly, twenty-two years later, our country is witnessing public displays from terrorist sympathizers taking to the streets and condoning Hamas’ brutal attacks against the State of Israel,” the letter read.

The 2024 Republican Party platform also calls for deporting “pro-Hamas radicals” to make college campuses “safe and patriotic again”.

Dima Khalidi, director of the advocacy group Palestine Legal, said it is “clear” that Trump’s recent executive order was crafted to specifically target Palestinian rights supporters.

Critics say the bottom line is that, while Trump’s first “Muslim ban” targeted travelers from several Muslim-majority countries, this order has farther-reaching consequences, including about what it means to be an American.

For example, the decree calls for measures to ensure the “proper assimilation” of immigrants and “promote a unified American identity”.

Jamshidi said the order has “broader implications for all sorts of groups than the initial iterations of the Muslim ban”.

“It’s another salvo in the right’s culture wars,” she said.

Source: Al Jazeera English