The legality and morality of Trump's #MuslimBan

Comment: In this article, Omar Mohammedi – President of the Association of Muslim American lawyers – unpicks the challenges to Trump’s travel ban, and demonstrates its legal as well as moral flaws.

As early as 7 December 2015, in the midst of the Republican primaries, Donald Trump proposed a systemic policy of religious discrimination against Muslims with regards to immigration into the United States. The trump campaign issued a press release setting forth his ideas to prevent Muslim immigration, and calling for a total “shutdown” of Muslims entering the United States until the government could understand the dangerous threat of “Islamic terrorism”, where it comes from and why.

True to his promise, President Trump issued an Executive Order on 27 January 2017 entitled “Protecting the Nation from Foreign Terrorist Entry into the United States”.  Though the Trump Administration has adamantly claimed in the past week that the Order is a “travel ban” and not a “Muslim ban,” there is extensive extrinsic evidence that the intent and effect of the Order is, in fact, to preclude the immigration of Muslims into the United States.  Read More…