Trump Administration Successfully Implements Muslim Ban Using Quiet, Bureaucratic Measures

Don't take your eyes off the ball, folks. Just because you haven't heard much about the Trump administration's Muslim ban doesn't mean they're not working to make it a reality. They are quietly following through on Trump's promise of “total and complete shutdown of Muslims entering the United States.”

Lost amid the uproar over the Trump administration’s travel restrictions on citizens from Muslim-majority countries and the impending showdown at the Supreme Court are the insidious ways that the government has already begun to impose a Muslim ban.

It’s doing so through deceptively boring means: increasing administrative hurdles and cementing or even expanding the current travel restrictions that are not under review at the court. The collective impact of these changes will be that a permanent Muslim ban is enshrined into American immigration policy.

There is far more going on than a determination of what immigrants have a "bona fide relationship" with U.S. citizens or institutions, based on the Supreme Court ruling in June. The State Department has already imposed more involved visa requirements.

The State Department has already moved to implement the president’s “extreme vetting” directive by imposing new, onerous visa application requirements. Several weeks ago, the agency invoked emergency review and approval procedures to push through these changes with minimal public comment or scrutiny. They force applicants to submit years’ worth of personal data, including from social media accounts.

Of course, not all visa applicants are subject to this review; it’s only for “populations warranting increased scrutiny.”  But everyone knows that term is code for people from predominantly Muslim countries.  Even before these requirements were enacted, those people had to endure invasive questioning and prolonged processing times.  The Trump administration has simply formalized this as official government policy.

The key point here is that the Administration is making these moves "quietly," so we here at Smart Dissent are trying to bring this information to the public, because:

The Twitterverse and cable news pundits are unlikely to be mobilized by policy changes that come about through these types of bureaucratic processes. Most people are not closely following the intricacies of visa vetting and screening.

Disturbingly, these under-the-radar changes already appear to be working

That’s a shame because there is already evidence that they are working.  The number of visas issued to citizens from Muslim-majority countries has decreased by double digits.  Among nearly 50 Muslim-majority countries, nonimmigrant visas declined almost 20 percent in April, compared with the monthly average from 2016. Visas issued to people from Iran, Syria, Sudan, Somalia, Libya and Yemen, the six countries on the travel ban list, were down 55 percent.  Those figures will continue to get worse if these other provisions are implemented.

Source: https://www.nytimes.com/2017/07/18/opinion/trump-muslim-ban-supreme-court.html

Image Credit: Ariel Davis / NY Times