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True but the Muslim ban was still up on his campaign website as pointed out during the court hearing. The first XO was rushed in so fast that it even banned Green Card holders.
Keep in mind that the real reason for the "temporary" ban was to protect our nation from an immediate threat "until we can figure out what's going on". This was to be temporary until they could put in their new Extreme Vetting procedures, 5 months later there is nothing, absolutely nothing.
Does anyone really believe this was going to be a temporary ban.
So the whole premise of the executive order is that we're going to stop all refugees and we're going to stop travelers from seven countries for a few months because we need to overhaul the way that we screen people before they come into the United States. Well, I talked to somebody who does that screening. He's on the staff of the United States Citizen and Immigration Services, USCIS. He's an interviewer. Flies to Africa and to the Mideast. He's interviewed Africans from all seven countries that we have temporarily banned. Sits with people for hours, drilling them on the details of their stories, looking for inconsistencies and lies. He asked that we not use his name or put his voice here on the radio, so I'm going to call him Bob. We have an actor, Scott Shepherd, saying what he said here on the air.
Bob said that when he and his colleagues heard about the executive order, the reaction was mostly shock and sadness. A few dozen of them went out for drinks together, and some people cried then.
Quote:
Ira Glass
Now, the whole premise for this executive order is that our ways of screening people to come into this country from these particular countries is not strong enough, and we're not doing a good enough job. And the president wants to put in something that he's calling extreme vetting. What do you think of that idea?
Bob
I find it personally offensive because it implies that those of us who vet refugees weren't doing extreme vetting before, that the work that I do as a refugee officer wasn't adequate to begin with. And I take the security of our country as my first priority. So I would never let someone in who I was suspicious of.
Ira Glass
Bob and I talked for a while about the vetting procedures that are in place now. And they are considerable. People are fingerprinted. We take biometric data. In many countries, there are iris scans. Security checks are run by the FBI, the CIA, the Department of Defense, the National Security Agency, the National Counterterrorism Center, and sometimes others. They look at criminal databases and terrorism watch lists. They check family members' affiliations. They'll call contacts on people's smartphones. They have document verification labs. They compare the biometric information. And of course, they check people's social media accounts.
The interviews Bob does are face to face. They take hours. A lawyer that I talked to who advocates for refugees seeking asylum, Laura Finkbeiner from the International Refugee Assistance Project, emphasized how these interviews are customized for each person.
Laura Finkbeiner
So they have a bunch of screening questions that they've particularly crafted, and they do this based on country. So they know if you're from a certain area at a certain time, there were certain groups active there. So they're checking to see-- they're asking you questions that are based specifically on your story, and they're making sure that what you're saying is credible, so it's consistent with what they know about the area at that given time.
Bob
And so we are looking for discrepancies in that information.
Ira Glass
I asked Bob about this.
Bob
Like, if those stories don't match, explain to me why not.
Ira Glass
And so basically, are you just running them through a million little details, trying to trip them up?
Bob
For the most part, yeah.
Ira Glass
And this has become an incredibly politicized question, but I hope you can answer it honestly. Are there times in your job where you feel like, oh, I really can't tell about this person and I wish I had more tools? I wish there was more I could do to figure this out better?
Bob
There are times that, because it's impossible to know about some people for whatever reason. But that's why we have a process. We're not letting people in that we have question marks about.
Ira Glass Oh. You're saying, if you can't figure it out, then they just don't get in.
Bob Right. Right.
This part sounded pretty crazy to me - although, not too surprising, either. It speaks to the off-the-cuff style of the Trump WH.
Quote:
Kirk Johnson
I'm really in this twilight zone because I'm seeing the President of the United States and his advisers try to draft policy to address a problem that doesn't exist.
Ira Glass
And what problem is that?
Kirk Johnson Well, he campaigned by saying that we're not vetting these people. And the only way you can say that is if you don't know anything about how people are vetted. And you know, Trump's a busy guy. I don't expect him to sit down and learn the two-year vetting process in place by the US Refugee Admissions Program, but I sure as hell expect Steve Bannon or Steve Miller or any of the Steves who drafted this thing to just spend a few minutes and find out what is already in place. And I know for a fact that they did not go to the State Department's Refugee Processing people, the people that have been doing this for decades-- they never even got a basic briefing as to what currently exists.
Ira Glass How do you know that they didn't consult with the State Department?
Kirk Johnson I was on the phone with the State Department minutes before he signed it, asking whether or not these people that I was pushing were going to be able to board a plane that night.
Ira Glass
And this is in which office of the State Department?
Kirk Johnson
In the Population, Refugees, and Migration bureau.
Ira Glass
And that's who manages these programs to figure out who can come into the country?
Kirk Johnson
Right.
Ira Glass
Wait. And so you were on the phone with this person while the signing was happening?
Kirk Johnson
It was about three or four minutes beforehand, I reached out to this official at the State Department to say what's going to happen when she shows up to the airport, and he didn't know. And I said, how can you not know? Haven't they been coming and working this all out with you? And there was silence, and I pushed him. And he said, well, what do you want me to say? I'm sitting here refreshing the White House website just like you are.
Ira Glass
Looking for the text of the executive order.
Yeah, because favoring a democratically elected president over a bunch of unelected people who gave lots of money to a political party is just so totalitarian of me.
We will if you other Liberals have a terrorist Action in your back yard. All this BS will go away and it is with the President to Protect American Citizen's and our Country.
We are speaking to 7 countries who are anti American and would love to slip in a soldier of Islam.
This argument is so short sighted, I wonder if many of these Liberals Posters , "Who side are you on?"
Didn't you know that he then changed it to six and not seven?
Aside from that our DEMOCRATIC system defines the right of Democratically elected Presidents to nominate such judges and our Democratically elected members of Congress to confirm them. Sounds pretty Democratic to me.
Ken
Hillary got the illegal vote. Big deal. Trump still won. Thanks for reminding us how judges are installed. I'll remind you that regardless of how they are installed, they are not elected.
i find it intriguing that executive orders were signed by bush, obama, and clinton doing pretty much the same things, using exactly the same law (8 usc 1182), and no court ever took note of them.
But, because trump did it, the courts are all over it.
Interesting.
True but the Muslim ban was still up on his campaign website as pointed out during the court hearing. The first XO was rushed in so fast that it even banned Green Card holders.
Keep in mind that the real reason for the "temporary" ban was to protect our nation from an immediate threat "until we can figure out what's going on". This was to be temporary until they could put in their new Extreme Vetting procedures, 5 months later there is nothing, absolutely nothing.
Does anyone really believe this was going to be a temporary ban.
Re: President-for-now Trump's Orwellian deletion:
Quote:
President Trump’s campaign appears to have scrubbed the 2015 press release calling for a halt on Muslim immigration to the United States following a reporter’s question on Monday — as well as all its other campaign statements.
“Minutes after we asked the WH why the President's campaign website still calls for a Muslim ban, it appears the statement was deleted,” ABC News’s Cecilia Vega wrote on Twitter. ...
The outcome in the Supreme Court will be interesting, but the bolded just isn't true. The president has the power to set immigration policy. Absolutely. The issue with Trump's ban is that he specifically and repeatedly said he was going ban Muslims during his campaign which is a violation of the 1st Amendment. The reason his ban has been overturned (and he's lost his appeals) so far is that the courts see the ban as a fulfillment of his promise to ban Muslims, which again, is unconstitutional. The Supreme Court may rule that it's not a fulfillment of that pledge, but if he never ranted about banning Muslims in the first place, it probably wouldn't have been overturned to begin with. What you're seeing is what happens when the President doesn't understand how the Constitution works and also lacks the ability to control the words coming out of his mouth. Nothing more than that.
Good post.
I understand one of the dissenting opinions from the 4th (Judge Paul V. Niemeyer) put forth the notion questioning at what point does one's rhetoric become a mitigating factor in constitutionality. An example might be if one made a comment in college, perhaps an academic paper or a blog, OpEd piece or such, are you held in perpetuity liable for those statements? It's an interesting argument to make but I would hope the Supremes would hold that in this case, what transpired was a specific response to an actionable condition. If this happens, I will do this. There was nothing metaphorical or ambiguous about his statements. If I am President I will ban Muslims. He had the means to carry out intent.
If that's what the DOJ wants to hang their case on, one of three dissents in a 10-3 loss in the 4th after two losses in two other federal courts, have at it. Considering the success rate Trump has had in anything else that doesn't involve simply issuing EO's, I wouldn't rate their chances very high.
If you are a refugee running from violence back home I kind'a think you suffer irreparable harm if you are prevented from escaping. There has not been EVEN ONE terrorist attack by refugees from ANY of the countries in question - NOT ONE.
Why didn't Trump ban SAUDI's? Oh, because he's got business interests there? Who is Trump watching out for? - it certainly doesn't seem like it's the American People.
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