Anger and condemnation broke out as families, attorneys and immigrant advocates absorbed the blast from the latest bombshell delivered by the Trump immigration — a travel ban that stops or restricts people from 19 mostly African, Asian and Caribbean countries from entering the U.S.
While the Trump administration said the travel ban is meant to keep Americans safe, critics lobbed accusations of discrimination, cruelty, racism, inhumanity and more in response. Meanwhile, the news also elicited confusion over what will happen once the ban goes into effect on Monday.
“This travel ban is a racist, bigoted and xenophobic and deeply un-American attack on human rights — it’s like persecution. We have fled dictatorship, violence, hunger,” Adelys Ferro, executive director of the Venezuelan American Caucus, told NBC News from Miami, a city with a large population of immigrants from several of the countries on Trump’s list.
“This administration clearly has something against immigrants, and it has something against us in particular,” said José Antonio Colina, a former Venezuelan army lieutenant who fled to Miami in 2003 and heads the exile organization Veppex. “We are double-persecuted. We are persecuted by the tyranny of Nicolás Maduro and we are persecuted by the administration of Donald Trump.”
A 38-year-old Haitian green-card holder in Miami who was too fearful to allow her name to be used said she and many others in the community feel “confused and scared” over the travel ban on Haiti. She said most of her family lives there, including her sister and father, who is sick. “They come all the time to visit and now I don’t know if they will be able to,” she said, adding she heard there were exceptions to the ban but wasn’t sure.
There are some exceptions, including for people with lawful permanent residency, spouses and children of U.S. citizens, those who are adopted and others.
“But if you are a spouse of a permanent resident, forget about it,” said Doug Rand, former director of U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services during the Biden administration. It will also impact other relatives, such as adult children and siblings of lawful permanent residents, people who won the diversity lottery or were sponsored by a U.S. employer and are from the listed countries, “people who have been waiting for years and done it the right way,” he said.
In Havana, a queue of people outside the American Embassy learned the news of the travel ban and suspensions as they waited for their visa interviews.
“I had been waiting nine years for this moment,” said one young woman in line, who declined to be identified by name for fear it might affect her visa chances. She and others said the suspension means not being able to visit family or escape dire circumstances in Cuba.
“If they don’t grant visas, Cubans will starve, given the situation, they will starve,” said Ismael Gainza, a retired Cuban. “I see that measure as bad, I see it as bad because the situation is tough and we have to survive.”
Trump’s proclamation issued Wednesday night bans people from 12 countries from traveling to the U.S. The countries are: Afghanistan, Myanmar, Chad, Republic of Congo, Equatorial Guinea, Eritrea, Haiti, Iran, Libya, Somalia, Sudan and Yemen.
In seven more countries, travel to the U.S. was suspended but not banned. They are Burundi, Cuba, Laos, Sierra Leone, Togo, Turkmenistan and Venezuela.
Shahzeen Karim, managing attorney at Hafey & Karim law firm, said that although she’s in the immigration law space, she holds “Republican views” on the topic, agreeing there’s a need for a stricter immigration policy and more thorough screening.
“I know the White House presented some explanations as to why each of those countries, but I can’t help but feel very targeted, being a Muslim immigration attorney,” Karim said. “The countries are majority Muslim unfortunately.”
Challenging the ban could be ‘an uphill battle’
Immigration advocates said that, unlike Trump’s previous travel ban, which caught them off guard, they expected the president would enact a similar policy in his second term. Trump’s 2017 ban immediately barred Muslims from entering the country, leaving some stranded at airports or unable to board flights.
But like his previous ban, the impact of the current ban taking effect next week will be felt by people trying to bring together families, those who landed a job in the U.S., who had tours or visits planned, who planned to study here or were looking forward to a cultural exchange.
It took three tries for Trump, in his previous administration, to come up with a travel ban that the U.S. Supreme Court would accept. Lower courts nixed the first version and the administration kept revising it until the high court accepted its third version in June 2018. Immigration and civil rights groups opposed all three versions.
Raha Wala, vice president of strategy and partnerships at the National Immigration Law Center, said that challenging the latest ban “will be an uphill battle” because the Supreme Court decision is the law of the land.
Edward Cuccia, an immigration attorney in New York City, said that blocking the latest ban could be tougher now than in 2017.
“Trump got smarter this time,” he said, explaining that the mix of countries makes it harder to argue that the ban is discriminatory.
Also, the implementation won’t be as abrupt and the argument that the singled-out nations do not vet the documents of their citizens well may hold up in court, according to Cuccia.
Even so, the implications are vast for the people who are affected and are not a security threat, he said.
“What is this going to mean for family unification? There’s a lot of countries here!” Cuccia said. “And then, there are people that maybe had business dealings, people who wanted to do investments here in the United States or come over on temporary work visas, student visas or even just to visit … That seems to be gone out the window.”
Wala called the justification for the ban — that visa overstays present a national security threat and the inability to fully vet visa travelers in those countries — a “fig leaf.”
If there is a gap in vetting, “that’s worth taking a look at,” he said, but added that “all kinds of people overstay their visas — and just because someone overstayed their visa and committed a crime, we just have to get away from this guilt by association concept.”
For Wala, the newly announced ban cannot be separated from the president’s previous policies and statements.
“This ban started as the president saying he was going to have a complete and total shutdown of Muslims in the country. And he also said he wants to ban folks — and pardon my French here — from s—hole countries,” Wala said.
In Miami, Colina said he was glad the ban would prevent officials of Maduro’s regime in Venezuela and their families “who always find a way” to get a visa to enter the country, “but they are a minority, and the partial ban will negatively impact the larger community and it’s not fair.”
