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Trump Signs Executive Order Barring Muslims From Certain Countries From Entering The U.S. (Updated)
Topic Started: Jan 28 2017, 01:39 AM (886 Views)
Webster
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MSN News: Trump Bars All Refugees, and Citizens From 7 Muslim Nations
Quote:
 
WASHINGTON — President Trump on Friday closed the nation’s borders to refugees from around the world, ordering that families fleeing Syrian carnage be indefinitely blocked from entering the United States, and temporarily suspending immigration from several predominantly Muslim countries.

Declaring the measure part of an extreme vetting plan to “keep radical Islamic terrorists” out of the country, Mr. Trump also ordered that Christians around the globe who are seeking entry into the United States should be granted priority over Muslims, for the first time establishing a religious test for refugees.

“We don’t want them here,” Mr. Trump said of Islamic terrorists during a signing ceremony at the Pentagon. “We want to ensure that we are not admitting into our country the very threats our soldiers are fighting overseas. We only want to admit those into our country who will support our country, and love deeply our people.”

Earlier in the day, Mr. Trump explained to an interviewer for the Christian Broadcasting Network that Christians in Syria were “horribly treated” and alleged that under previous administrations, “if you were a Muslim you could come in, but if you were a Christian, it was almost impossible.”

“I thought it was very, very unfair. So we are going to help them,” the president said.

The executive order suspends the entry of refugees into the United States for 120 days and directs officials to determine additional screening ”to ensure that those approved for refugee admission do not pose a threat to the security and welfare of the United States.”

The order also stops the admission of refugees from Syria indefinitely, and bars entry into the United States for 90 days from seven predominantly Muslim countries linked to concerns about terrorism. Those countries are: Iraq, Syria, Iran, Sudan, Libya, Somalia and Yemen.

Additionally, Mr. Trump signed a memorandum on Friday directing what he called “a great rebuilding of the armed services,” saying it would call for budget negotiations to acquire new planes, new ships and new resources for the nation’s military.

“Our military strength will be questioned by no one, but neither will our dedication to peace,” Mr. Trump said.

Announcing his “extreme vetting” plan, the president invoked the specter of the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks. Most of the 19 hijackers on the planes that crashed into the World Trade Center, the Pentagon and a field in Shanksville, Pa., were from Saudi Arabia. The rest were from the United Arab Emirates, Egypt and Lebanon. None of those countries is on Mr. Trump’s visa ban list.

Human rights activists roundly condemned Mr. Trump’s actions, describing them as officially sanctioned religious persecution dressed up to look like an effort to make the United States safer.

The International Rescue Committee called it “harmful and hasty.” The American Civil Liberties Union described it as a “euphemism for discriminating against Muslims.” Raymond Offensheiser, the president of Oxfam America, said the order will harm families around the world who are threatened by authoritarian governments.

“The refugees impacted by today’s decision are among the world’s most vulnerable people — women, children, and men — who are simply trying to find a safe place to live after fleeing unfathomable violence and loss,” Mr. Offensheiser said.

The president signed the executive order shortly after issuing a statement noting that Friday was International Holocaust Remembrance Day, an irony that many of his critics highlighted on Twitter.
...continued in next post....
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Webster
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(The Guardian) Trump has tweeted again citing the deaths of Christians in the Middle East as justification for his travel ban.

--Christians in the Middle-East have been executed in large numbers. We cannot allow this horror to continue!(Donald J. Trump, President of the United States - 29 Jan. 2017)
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Webster
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(The Guardian) The scale of opposition to Trump’s travel plan in the UK continues to grow. A petition to cancel a state visit by the US president, planned for later this year, had a couple of hundred signatures this morning. It now stands at over 300,000.
-Read more: https://petition.parliament.uk/petitions/171928
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Webster
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(The Guardian) According to the Guardian’s political editor Anushka Asthana, Ruth Davidson, the Scottish Tory leader, has added her voice to calls for Trump’s state visit to the UK to be cancelled.

State visits are designed for both the host, and the head of state who is being hosted, to celebrate and entrench the friendships and shared values between their respective countries.

A state visit from the current president of the United States could not possibly occur in the best traditions of the enterprise while a cruel and divisive policy which discriminates against citizens of the host nation is in place.

I hope President Trump immediately reconsiders his Muslim ban.
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Webster
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(The Guardian) The Press Association has just filed this: Prime minister Theresa May has ordered foreign secretary Boris Johnson and home secretary Amber Rudd to telephone their American counterparts to make representations about the US travel ban, Downing Street has said.
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Webster
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(The Guardian) Thousands expected at protest rallies across the US

--At 1pm ET, a huge rally is expected in Copley Square, Boston, hosted by CAIR Massachusetts. Over 16,000 people marked themselves as attending on the Facebook event. It will be held at “at the site of the Khalil Gibran Plaque - Gibran was an immigrant from Lebanon”, reads the event description.
--At 2pm a large rally is expected at Battery Park in lower Manhattan, hosted by the New York Immigration Coalition. Over 9,500 people have marked themselves as attending on Facebook.
--Thousands are expected to descend on the White House in DC at 1pm to protest the ban, with 13,000 people on Facebook saying they will attend the “No Muslim Ban” rally hosted by the group Peace for Iran.
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Webster
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(The Guardian) From the Guardian’s Ireland correspondent: St Patrick’s Day and the annual “hooley” at the White House to celebrate Ireland’s national day could pose embarrassment for some of the Irish political parties that normally attend the Washington DC celebrations on 17 March.

The leader of the nationalist Social Democratic and Labour Party Colum Eastwood confirmed today he will boycott Donald Trump’s hosting of the Shamrock-tinged shindig this year.

Speaking today ahead of Theresa May’s visit to Dublin on Monday where she will hold Brexit talks with Taoiseach Enda Kenny, Eastwood said the Trump ban on Muslim travellers underpinned his decision not to attend this year’s St.Patrick’s Day party in the White House.

He said it was up to other political parties both in Northern Ireland and the Irish Republic to decide if they thought it was right to attend the annual St.Patrick’s Day party.

Eastwood said: “The worst fears about the Trump Presidency are coming to fruition. These immigration bans are a method of designed discrimination against one religion.

“This US presidency is not normal therefore normal diplomatic niceties should not apply. I would urge the Irish government to take every step possible to ensure that these discriminatory checks and bans are not enforced at our airports. We should have no hand, act or part in implementing this ban,” said Eastwood.

Taoiseach Kenny is expected to accept the new US President’s invite to the traditional St.Patrick’s Day celebrations but the Irish Premier’s Foreign Minister has expressed deep concern over the anti Muslim travel ban today.

Charlie Flanagan said he would be raising the ban during his visit to Washington DC next week.

“While US immigration policy is a matter for the US authorities, it is clear that the most recent decisions could have far-reaching implications - both on humanitarian grounds and on relations between the US and the global Muslim community,” the Republic’s Foreign Minister said.
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Webster
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(The Guardian) Travel ban will no longer apply to green-card holders, says Priebus

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--Only a day after casting airports around the US into confusion and hours after his first defeat in federal court, Donald Trump and his advisers flew into a defense of his vague and chaotically enforced ban on travel from seven Muslim-majority countries.

Trump’s chief of staff, Reince Priebus, however, appeared to concede ground when he said the ban would no longer apply to green-card holders.

Appearing on NBC’s Meet the Press on Sunday, Priebus said 325,000 travellers had entered the US on Saturday and 109 were detained.

“Most of those people were moved out,” he said. “We’ve got a couple dozen more that remain and I would suspect that as long as they’re not awful people that they will move through before another half a day today.”

In an abrupt, apparent change from the White House’s original policy, Priebus said the order would no longer affect green-card holders. But he also suggested that “other countries” may “need to be added” to the travel ban.

“Maybe some of those people should be detained,” he said, although valid visa holders have already passed through an arduous screening and interview process.
-Read more: https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2017/jan/29/trump-muslim-country-travel-ban-john-mccain
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(The Guardian) John McCain: "very concerned" travel ban helps Isis

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--Senator John McCain spoke publicly about his concern that Trump’s travel ban executive order could aid Isis by giving them more reasons to encourage its supporters against the US.

“I think the effect will probably in some areas give Isis some more propaganda,” McCain said in an interview with CBS’s Face the Nation.

McCain, chair of the Senate Armed Services Committee and a Republican from Arizona, added that he was “very concerned about our effect on the Iraqis right now”.

He noted that former CIA Director David Petraeus is “very concerned” for local translators who worked for the US military, who often do the job specifically in the hope of receiving a visa to the US.

After the travel ban, a former military translator, Iraqi Hameed Khalid Darweesh, was amongst those stopped at JFK airport this weekend and initially refused entry.
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(The Guardian) Nesrine Malik, a Sudanese-born writer who lives in London, writes about the personal impact of the travel ban: I now cannot travel to the US, a country I visit frequently and in which I have work interests, close family and dear friends. It is a curious feeling, a new feeling. One that collapses space-time and connects you to all those before you who have found themselves on the ugly end of a collective insanity. It is a feeling that rocks the very ground on which you thought we all stood.

Suddenly, all certainties look shaky. Residencies, passports, green cards, jobs, mortgages, friends, marriages – all the things you thought fortified you against the mobilisation of state machinery – dissolve. You are only a Muslim. And what does that mean? It is a tag that defies definition, becoming more elusive the more you try to pin it down. I was reminded of a scene from a dramatisation of Roots author Alex Haley’s life, when he, dressed proudly in his US Coast Guard uniform and sporting his medals, confidently asks for a hotel room for the night for him and his wife. When he is refused one for being black, he returns to his car enraged – not at those who denied him but at himself for thinking he was exempt. “All they saw was a monkey.”

-Read more: https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2017/jan/29/muslims-america-untouchables-donald-trump-ban-islamophobia
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(The Guardian) Earlier today Trump spokeswoman Kellyanne Conway falsely told Fox News Sunday that last night’s stay decision by a New York federal judge “doesn’t really affect the executive order.”

“The judge in Brooklyn, the Obama appointee judge in Brooklyn’s stay of order really doesn’t affect the executive order at all, because the executive order is meant to be prospective,” she told host Christ Wallace.

“It’s preventing not detaining,” she said.

Not all aspects of the executive order are covered by the Brooklyn judge’s decision but it does stop deportations.

She also said she understood what it was like to be stopped at airports but that it was a small price to pay for national security.

“I was stopped many times ... after 9/11,” she said. “I didn’t resemble, or share a name with, or be part of any kind of terrorist conspiracy, but this is what we do to keep a nation safe.”
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Posted Image
--Copley Square in Boston, marching against POTUS' exec order on immigration ban. (Jack Lapierz, WBUR Boston - 29 Jan. 2017)

Posted Image
--Orange Line is packed as Bostonians head to protest Trump's #MuslimBan. (David Abel, Boston Globe - 29 Jan. 2017)
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Webster
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(The Guardian) Reporter Alice Ross has been speaking to people affected by the travel ban, and people suddenly being cut off from those they love is a recurrent theme.

Posted Image

She spoke to a gay US citizen who was tantalizingly close to being able to bring his Iranian fiancé to the US: I am a US citizen by birth and a gay male. When travelling in Iran as a tourist I met a Kurdish Iranian, also a gay male and we fell in love. I applied for a K1 Fiancé Visa and my petition was approved. Last November we travelled to Turkey where my fiancé had his interview at the US Embassy in Ankara. After two months of processing and vetting the visa was approved three days before President Trump took office.

When I heard the news about the executive order, I wanted to vomit. If my fiancé stays in Iran he will never be able to live freely and could be executed for his sexual orientation.

Our concern is that we’re going to miss the window of opportunity to get the visa - we only have until mid-April - which would mean we’d have to begin the process all over again. It’s so frustrating because we thought we’d made it, that we’d actually succeeded in demonstrating to the government that we had a legitimate relationship…

We were celebrating. We were to meet in Istanbul in March, send his passport to the embassy to get the visa, and enjoy some time together in Turkey before he finishes his Masters. Then he was going to fly here and it was going to be a happy ever after kind of story. And now the whole bottom has dropped out of everything.
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Webster
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(The Guardian) The president of Columbia University, Lee Bollinger, emailed all staff and students of the university last night speaking out against Trump’s travel ban, noting the impact it will have on the academic community. While it seems no Columbia University staff have been caught up so far, many other academics and students from other universities have been amongst those stopped from entering.

In the email published at Columbia Spectator, Bollinger wrote: An estimated 17,000 international students in the U.S. are from the seven nations covered by the entry ban. Scholars planning to travel to the United States for meetings and conferences at our colleges and universities will effectively be barred from attending. If this order stands, there is the certainty of a profound impact on our University community, which is committed to welcoming students, faculty, and staff from around the world, as well as across the nation.

As I have said on many occasions, it is critically important that the University, as such, not take stands on ideological or political issues. Yet it is also true that the University, as an institution in the society, must step forward to object when policies and state action conflict with its fundamental values, and especially when they bespeak purposes and a mentality that are at odds with our basic mission. This is such a case.

-Read more: http://columbiaspectator.com/news/2017/01/29/bollinger-condemns-trumps-immigration-ban-discriminatory-damaging
Edited by Webster, Jan 29 2017, 02:46 PM.
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(The Guardian) Connecticut Senator Chris Murphy promises to introduce a bill to overturn Trump’s executive order this week, although since Congress and the Senate are both Republican controlled it has very little to no chance of passing.

--The law is clear. The #MuslimBan is illegal. I will introduce a bill this week to immediately overturn this dangerous, hateful order. (Sen. Chris Murphy, D-CT - 29 Jan. 2017)
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Posted Image
--View from Sky 7 of the protest in Copley Square right now -- in opposition to President Trump's exec orders (Nancy Chen, WHDH Boston - 29 Jan. 2017)
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