Returning United States President Donald Trump has reimposed and drastically expanded his infamous travel ban, this time barring the citizens of 12 nations, seven of which are Muslim-majority countries, and a near-total ban on seven others.
We’re moving them out. And we’re moving them out very strongly, but it can’t come fast enough.
We want to get them out. We want to get them out now.
We don’t want to have other bad people coming into our country, but using the word bad, I’m being nice.
US President Donald Trump
Iran is one of the totally banned nations, and analysts say that the anti-Muslim nature of the ban is revealed by Trump’s specific exemption for Iran’s “ethnic and religious minorities”.
This isn’t new. It’s not like we’re dealing with someone new. It’s someone that we had the previous four years with, and we saw what he did.
We saw the vehement racism that he had towards the Muslim community, the Muslim ban, how he randomly decided that I’m not going to let people in from these countries because of some misconstrued way that he views Muslims and the Muslim community, because of how he and the American empire treated the Muslim people in the Middle East.
Adam Barghouti, Palestinian Youth Movement
Despite a widespread backlash to Trump’s first-term ban, which only targeted seven countries, all Muslim majority, the US Supreme Court upheld the xenophobic order.
The ban returns amid an even more xenophobic and hysterical climate; the Israeli US attempted genocide in Gaza has resulted in the harassment, arrest and even deportation of visa holders simply for expressing pro-Palestinian sentiments.
What he wants is total loyalty and subjugation to him. If you’re Muslim, if you’re Christian, he just wants you to subjugate yourself to them.
Even this delusion of the American Dream that you can come and assimilate; assimilation means removing yourself of all your loyalties to your home and to your family’s back home, to your religion, and subjugating yourself to the US Empire.
And it’s not something that’s new. It’s just going to be increased.
Adam Barghouti, Palestinian Youth Movement
Polls from the first Muslim travel ban showed an almost evenly split American public, while the second ban comes on the heels of the largest two-year increase in the foreign-born population in American history.
Nearly all the banned and partially banned countries share one characteristic. They have been recently destabilized by a war or sanctions campaign led by the United States, France, or a coalition of Western nations.
