Amid reports that President Donald Trump is planning to expand his travel ban, Speaker of the Home Nancy Pelosi is sending a message: She introd
Amid reports that President Donald Trump is planning to expand his travel ban, Speaker of the Home Nancy Pelosi is sending a message: She introduced Monday that the Home will maintain a vote within the coming weeks on a invoice that may dismantle it altogether.
The invoice, referred to as the Nationwide Origin-Primarily based Anti-discrimination for Nonimmigrants (NO BAN) Act, would repeal Trump’s journey ban on residents of seven international locations and restrict the president’s authority to subject such sweeping bans sooner or later. It might additionally strengthen present prohibitions on non secular discrimination with respect to visa functions assured by the Immigration and Nationality Act (INA) — what immigrant advocates have praised as a way of defending the rights of American Muslims.
The INA at the moment bans discrimination within the issuance of visas solely on the premise of “race, intercourse, nationality, hometown and place of residence.” There isn’t any provision prohibiting non secular discrimination, which made it tougher for immigrant advocates to argue that the journey ban was illegal.
The invoice seeks to appropriate this by amending the INA to require that any journey ban be short-term, primarily based on credible proof, topic to congressional oversight, and be created solely in response to particular actions international entities have taken to threaten the US. The invoice additionally states {that a} ban should additionally advance a compelling authorities curiosity within the least restrictive manner doable.
These proposals have been praised by immigration advocates, like these on the National Immigration Law Center, who stated they’d “be sure that future presidents wouldn’t be allowed to subject orders primarily based so clearly on anti-Muslim bias or some other religion-based animus and that each visa applicant would obtain particular person consideration.”
The Home Judiciary Committee will debate and doubtlessly amend the invoice, which has broad Democratic assist, within the subsequent two weeks, and is predicted to advance to the ground for a full Home vote. However even when the invoice passes the Home, it has little prospect of clearing — and even being thought of in — the Republican-led Senate, the place several current immigration bills have languished.
This congressional actuality makes Pelosi’s present of assist for the invoice look like as a lot about warning Trump to assume twice about increasing his journey ban as it’s about coverage.
“Home Democrats proceed to face against President Trump’s merciless, un-American journey ban in all of its iterations,” Pelosi stated in a statement Monday.
The NO BAN Act comes as Trump threats to broaden the journey ban
Politico reported final week that Trump is weighing increasing the present ban to cowl residents of seven extra international locations: Belarus, Myanmar, Eritrea, Kyrgyzstan, Nigeria, Sudan, and Tanzania. The ban would forestall most residents of these international locations from coming to the US, with exceptions for refugees and people who have already got US inexperienced playing cards or visas.
Beneath the primary model of the ban, unveiled in January 2017, residents of seven majority-Muslim international locations, together with those that held US green cards and dual US citizenship, have been held for questioning for a lot of hours at airports throughout the nation and have been denied entry to the US. A de facto “Muslim ban,” the coverage seemed to be the execution of Trump’s name on the marketing campaign path for a “total and complete shutdown” of Muslims coming into the US and sparked widespread protests all through the nation.
That ban was amended within the face of courtroom challenges; the model of the ban now in place — the third Trump has issued — was upheld by the US Supreme Court docket in June 2018. It locations restrictions on residents of Iran, Libya, Somalia, Syria, Yemen, Venezuela, and North Korea who search to enter the US. (Chad was taken off the record of nations topic to the ban final April after it met the Trump administration’s calls for to share data with US authorities that might help in efforts to vet foreigners.)
The NO BAN Act is an effort to negate the Supreme Court docket’s ruling, albeit one which’s unlikely to succeed. However even when it fails within the Senate, the invoice will enable Democrats to distinction themselves with Trump forward of the 2020 election and current themselves as a celebration that welcomes immigrants, quite than retaining them out.