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Any reasonable American could objectively ask what exactly President Donald Trump’s new travel ban, which affects a dozen countries, is about.
Is it about protecting Americans from “murderers,” as Trump said Thursday, or punishing small countries for a modest number of students who overstayed their visas?
The drive for Trump’s first-term travel ban in 2017 and 2018 was clear.
He was seeking to deliver on an ugly campaign promise to ban all Muslims from entering the US. That morphed, over the course of years as the administration adapted to court cases, into a ban on travel to the US by people from certain countries, most of which were majority-Muslim.
It was only by agreeing to ignore Trump’s anti-Muslim 2016 campaign statements and focus solely on the security-related language in his third attempt at a travel ban that the US Supreme Court ultimately gave its blessing to that ban.
“… We must consider not only the statements of a particular President, but also the authority of the Presidency itself,” wrote Chief Justice John Roberts in the majority opinion.
Trump is using that authority again in his second term.
But this time, as he said Thursday in the Oval Office, the ban is about removing “horrendous” people who are in the country now and about keeping murderers out.
The data suggest the travel ban will primarily affect students and businesspeople from countries in Africa, Asia and the Caribbean as well as the Middle East.
It was an attack on Jewish community members in Colorado by an Egyptian national that convinced Trump to speed up plans to ban people from a dozen countries from entering the US, restarting the travel ban policy he pioneered during his first term.
But Egypt is not on the travel ban list.
Neither is Kuwait, the country where Mohamed Sabry Soliman, the suspect in the Boulder attack, lived before coming to the US.
“Egypt has been a country we deal with very closely. They have things under control,” Trump told reporters Thursday.
Instead, the travel ban includes countries that Trump and Secretary of State Marco Rubio, who assembled the list, feel don’t have things under control.
That includes places like Equatorial Guinea in Africa and Burma, also known as Myanmar, in Asia. Neither is a nexus of terror threatening the American homeland.
Trump’s order announcing the travel ban explains that these countries have high rates of students and other travelers overstaying their visas in the US.
It points to a report of DHS “overstay” data from 2023 to argue that for more than 70% of people from Equatorial Guinea with US student visas, there is no record of them leaving the US when their visa ended.
In real numbers, that equals 233 people with student visas. The numbers are similarly small for other African countries.
“They’re just throwing things at the wall,” said David Bier, an immigration expert at the libertarian-leaning Cato institute and a Trump immigration policy critic.
“There’s not really a coherent philosophy behind any of this,” Bier added.
The reinstated travel ban does include countries associated with terrorism, including Iran, Libya, Somalia, Sudan, and Yemen, all of which were also included in Trump’s first-term travel ban. But it’s worth noting that no immigrant or traveler from one of these countries has launched a terror attack on the US in recent years, according to a review by the Washington Post during Trump’s first term. A man from Sudan killed one person at a Tennessee church in 2017.
“The president claims that there is no way to vet these nationals, yet that is exactly what his consular officers and border officials have successfully done for decades,” Bier said.
The man responsible for the ISIS-inspired truck bomb in New Orleans in January, Shamsud-Din Jabbar, was a Texas-born Army veteran and US citizen.
The new travel ban also includes Afghanistan, which could jeopardize many Afghans related to those who aided the US during its war there, as Shawn VanDiver, president of the aid organization #AfghanEvac, told CNN’s Jim Sciutto on Thursday.
“There are 12,000 people who have been separated through the actions of our government, who have been waiting for more than three and a half years,” he said.
The Trump administration recently paused the processing of student visas, interrupting the plans of thousands of people to study in the US.
In the Oval Office, Trump said he was not interested in banning students from China.
“It’s our honor to have them, frankly, we want to have foreign students, but we want them to be checked,” Trump said, suggesting there will be even more strenuous background checks in the future.
The existence of the travel ban list could also factor into tariff negotiations the Trump administration has taken on with nations across the world, as well as its effort to countries nations to take back migrants it wants to deport.
“It’s about power and control and manipulating both the US population to suppress dissent as well as trying to manipulate foreign relations with these countries by getting them to do whatever he wants in order to get off the disfavored nation list,” Bier said.
