Trump looks over Executive Orders on April 21, 2017. Ron Sachs/Press Association. All rights reserved.On January 27, 2017, the US President issued an Executive Order entitled “Protecting the nation from foreign terrorists’ entry into the United States”.[1] The order suspended the admission to the US of nationals from seven countries – Iran, Iraq, Libya, Somalia, Sudan, Syria and Yemen – for a 90-day period. In addition, the order suspended the US Refugee Admissions Program for 120 days and placed a cap on the number of arrivals permitted in the fiscal year 2017. In another important move, the order requires the Department of Homeland Security together with the Attorney General to collect and publish, every 180 days, statistics on the number of foreign nationals charged with terrorism-related offences (or radicalised). The first travel ban also included a number of other grounds, which were removed from the second version.
The implementation of the Executive Order immediately resulted in substantial chaos in the travel industry as companies aligned their practices to the new reality of ‘non-admission’. It also sparked controversy in many parts of the country owing to the questionable legality of separating families and the constitutionality of the order itself. Several legal challenges were successfully waged in US trial courts, leading to a decision of the Court of Appeals for the 9th Circuit on February 9, which upheld the original decisions and refused to reverse the lower courts. The first plaintiffs in the matters were two states: Washington and Minnesota.
On March 6, the US President issued a new Executive Order[2] once again barring from entry into the US nationals of six countries – Iran, Libya, Somalia, Sudan, Syria and Yemen (Iraq had been taken off the list, a fact we will come back to shortly). Similarly to its predecessor, it suspended the refugee programme and ordered statistics on foreign offenders to be collected, but this time the argumentation for the selection of the six countries was (marginally) more sophisticated. A judge in Hawaii has already suspended the new Executive Order and at the time of writing it is not clear how far the US Government will appeal the matter.[3]
