President Donald Trump signed a new executive order Monday, exempting Iraq from a travel ban that prohibits foreign nationals from six predominantly Muslim-majority countries from entering the United States for 90 days. But despite Iraq being dropped from Trump’s ban, not all Iraqis with valid reasons to be in the United States will be able to enter.
A senior administration official said Monday that Iraq had been taken off the list because its government “agreed to enhance some of their travel documentation capabilities, bringing their travel documentation up to standards that’s much desired by the United States.” Unlike the original executive order, legal immigrants, permanent residents, and valid visa holders will still be allowed to enter the United States.
But the revised executive order would still ban all refugees for at least 120 days from the time the executive order goes into effect on March 16, 2017. The executive order would also reduce the number of refugee admissions to 50,000, down from the 110,000 promised by the Obama administration for the 2017 fiscal year. That means some of Iraq’s neediest are still impacted by the ban.
Any pause in the refugee resettlement process could lead to needless delays or even death for some people fleeing these countries. And as the delay wears on, the chances for them to survive may decline.
In Iraq, more than 45,000 people have fled Mosul over the past week, marking 187,986 displaced people in the surrounding areas since October 2016. A UNICEF Humanitarian Response Plan (HRP) for Iraq estimated that 11 million people are in dire need of humanitarian assistance, including five million children. And the conflict between the Iraq military and militant ISIS group has forced people to run from one dangerous situation to another, with some used as human shields. The Guardian reported that “Men and boys were forced to remove their shirts as they ran from Isis territory towards Iraqi military positions.”
“Since each part of the resettlement process is time sensitive, this 120 day ‘pause’ is not a pause as all — it will cause many refugees’ security checks to expire and force refugees who have already been approved to wait months and even years to go through multiple screenings all over again, while their lives hang in the balance,” Rev. John McCullough, Church World Service’s President and CEO, said in a statement.
In his executive order, President Donald Trump justified the temporary ban on refugees by claiming that “more than 300 people who entered the United States as refugees are currently the subjects of counterterrorism investigations by the Federal Bureau of Investigation.” U.S. officials on a conference call on Monday did not provide verifiable links to back up this claim, despite being repeatedly pressed by reporters to do so. Officials also did not detail the current immigration status of those 300 people.
The alleged FBI report that the administration cited comes about a week after the White House downplayed a Department of Homeland report finding that immigrants do not pose as big of a threat as Americans believe them to be and that “country of citizenship is unlikely to be a reliable indicator of potential terrorist activity.”
In recent days, Trump has depicted domestic attacks as committed by people from the countries included in the Muslim ban. In reality, foreigners pose less of a threat to Americans than right-wing extremists on domestic soil. A 2015 report found that “right-wing extremists averaged 337 attacks per year in the decade after 9/11, causing a total of 254 fatalities.”