President Donald Trump's executive immigration order
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US President Donald Trump has vowed to overturn a legal ruling which suspended his ban on travellers from seven mainly Muslim countries.
He described federal judge James Robart as a "so-called" justice whose "ridiculous" opinion "essentially takes law-enforcement away from" the US.
Judge Robart ruled on Friday there were grounds to challenge the ban.
A number of airlines have said they are allowing nationals targeted by the ban to board flights to America.
"The opinion of this so-called judge, which essentially takes law-enforcement away from our country, is ridiculous and will be overturned!" Mr Trump said on Twitter.
"When a country is no longer able to say who can, and who cannot , come in & out, especially for reasons of safety & security - big trouble!" he tweeted separately.
The US administration argues that his executive order last week, which caused confusion and anger, is designed to protect the US.
'Don't degrade us'
Dr Samuel Jacob, of the University of Pittsburgh Medical Center, was born in Syria. His Syrian wife has been unable to join him.
"I am going to meet with my attorney on Tuesday and he will know the latest information about whether my wife can try to come.
"It's hard to really understand the detail of this ruling without speaking to my lawyer and so I can't make a decision about what we can do until then.
"I live and work hard every day in the US to serve everybody and save lives but at the end of the day I still get classified by the government as simply an "x" or a "y" and treated accordingly.
"I work hard for the US and I expect the USA to help me and protect me and let me be with my family, not be degraded in this way."
The ban's implementation was halted with immediate effect by Judge Robart's ruling, in which he found that legal challenges to the ban launched by two states, Washington and Minnesota, were likely to succeed.
Homeland Security Department employees were told by the department to comply with the ruling immediately.
Customs officials told airlines that they could resume boarding banned travellers. Within hours, Qatar Airways said it would do so, followed by Air France, Etihad Airways, Lufthansa and others.
Iranian infant affected
Some would-be travellers were wary at news the ban had been suspended.
A cardiologist training in the US, who wished to remain anonymous, told BBC News his Syrian wife had recently joined him but people in her situation would not "take the risk of leaving the country in case things change back again".
Among those expected to travel soon is an Iranian infant with a heart defect who had been due to undergo life-saving surgery in the US.
The family of four-month-old Fatemeh Reshad flew her to Dubai last week to get a visa to enter the US, but this was denied under Mr Trump's ban.
The girl will now be allowed into the country and doctors have pledged to treat her for free, New York Governor Andrew Cuomo said late on Friday.
However it is unclear how many people concerned by the ban will decide to risk flying to the US.
The administration is expected to seek an emergency stay that would restore the restrictions.
In a statement, the White House described Mr Trump's directive as "lawful and appropriate".
"The president's order is intended to protect the homeland and he has the constitutional authority and responsibility to protect the American people," the statement said.
Mr Trump's order imposed an indefinite ban on Syrian refugees. Anyone arriving from Iraq, Syria, Iran, Libya, Somalia, Sudan or Yemen faces a 90-day visa suspension.
Washington state Attorney General Bob Ferguson described the move as unconstitutional.
"Folks who had visas, folks who were allowed to travel were denied that right without any due process whatsoever - that's un-American and unconstitutional," he said in a BBC interview.
Courts in at least four other states - Virginia, New York, Massachusetts and Michigan - are hearing cases challenging Mr Trump's executive order.
In London, protesters converged on the US embassy in Grosvenor Square on Saturday to vent their anger over the travel ban.
The London protesters were due to march to Whitehall
http://www.bbc.com/news/world-us-canada-38868571
He described federal judge James Robart as a "so-called" justice whose "ridiculous" opinion "essentially takes law-enforcement away from" the US.
Judge Robart ruled on Friday there were grounds to challenge the ban.
A number of airlines have said they are allowing nationals targeted by the ban to board flights to America.
"The opinion of this so-called judge, which essentially takes law-enforcement away from our country, is ridiculous and will be overturned!" Mr Trump said on Twitter.
"When a country is no longer able to say who can, and who cannot , come in & out, especially for reasons of safety & security - big trouble!" he tweeted separately.
The US administration argues that his executive order last week, which caused confusion and anger, is designed to protect the US.
'Don't degrade us'
Dr Samuel Jacob, of the University of Pittsburgh Medical Center, was born in Syria. His Syrian wife has been unable to join him.
"I am going to meet with my attorney on Tuesday and he will know the latest information about whether my wife can try to come.
"It's hard to really understand the detail of this ruling without speaking to my lawyer and so I can't make a decision about what we can do until then.
"I live and work hard every day in the US to serve everybody and save lives but at the end of the day I still get classified by the government as simply an "x" or a "y" and treated accordingly.
"I work hard for the US and I expect the USA to help me and protect me and let me be with my family, not be degraded in this way."
The ban's implementation was halted with immediate effect by Judge Robart's ruling, in which he found that legal challenges to the ban launched by two states, Washington and Minnesota, were likely to succeed.
Homeland Security Department employees were told by the department to comply with the ruling immediately.
Customs officials told airlines that they could resume boarding banned travellers. Within hours, Qatar Airways said it would do so, followed by Air France, Etihad Airways, Lufthansa and others.
Iranian infant affected
Some would-be travellers were wary at news the ban had been suspended.
A cardiologist training in the US, who wished to remain anonymous, told BBC News his Syrian wife had recently joined him but people in her situation would not "take the risk of leaving the country in case things change back again".
Among those expected to travel soon is an Iranian infant with a heart defect who had been due to undergo life-saving surgery in the US.
The family of four-month-old Fatemeh Reshad flew her to Dubai last week to get a visa to enter the US, but this was denied under Mr Trump's ban.
The girl will now be allowed into the country and doctors have pledged to treat her for free, New York Governor Andrew Cuomo said late on Friday.
However it is unclear how many people concerned by the ban will decide to risk flying to the US.
The administration is expected to seek an emergency stay that would restore the restrictions.
In a statement, the White House described Mr Trump's directive as "lawful and appropriate".
"The president's order is intended to protect the homeland and he has the constitutional authority and responsibility to protect the American people," the statement said.
Mr Trump's order imposed an indefinite ban on Syrian refugees. Anyone arriving from Iraq, Syria, Iran, Libya, Somalia, Sudan or Yemen faces a 90-day visa suspension.
Washington state Attorney General Bob Ferguson described the move as unconstitutional.
"Folks who had visas, folks who were allowed to travel were denied that right without any due process whatsoever - that's un-American and unconstitutional," he said in a BBC interview.
Courts in at least four other states - Virginia, New York, Massachusetts and Michigan - are hearing cases challenging Mr Trump's executive order.
In London, protesters converged on the US embassy in Grosvenor Square on Saturday to vent their anger over the travel ban.
The London protesters were due to march to Whitehall
http://www.bbc.com/news/world-us-canada-38868571
Devil Soul
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Passengers get airline ok after US court stays Trump travel ban
Home / World / Passengers get airline ok after US court stays Trump travel ban
By AFP
February 04, 2017
Latest : World
PARIS: Several airlines on Saturday gave the green light to passengers wanting to fly to the United States who come from countries hit by President Donald Trump´s travel ban after a US court suspended his order.
Seattle US District Judge James Robart on Friday blocked Trump´s controversial ban on travelers from seven Muslim countries, prompting a furious president to condemn it as a "ridiculous" move which he would overturn.
Although some airlines said they were waiting to see how the situation develops, carriers including Air France, Qatar Airways, Lufthansa and Swiss Airways said they would carry nationals of the countries concerned if they have a valid visa.
Following the court ruling, US authorities Saturday suspended the travel ban.
"We have reversed the provisional revocation of visas," a State Department spokesman told AFP.
"Those individuals with visas that were not physically cancelled may now travel if the visa is otherwise valid," the official said, while a complaint against Trump´s decree by Washington state´s attorney general Bob Ferguson is officially reviewed.
Ferguson said Friday the court´s suspension of Trump´s order meant "the constitution prevailed" as "no one is above the law -- not even the president."
Trump responded angrily, tweeting that "the opinion of this so-called judge, which essentially takes law-enforcement away from our country, is ridiculous and will be overturned!"
Among airlines confirming the greenlighting of passengers with valid visas, Air France told AFP that "since this morning we are applying with immediate effect the (US) judicial decision taken overnight. All passengers presenting themselves will embark once their papers are in order to travel to the United States."
Several other airlines confirmed on their websites they would carry visa-holding passengers even before news emerged of the State Department statement.
Trump last week issued a shock executive order banning for 90 days entry into the US by nationals of seven mainly Muslim countries -- Iran, Iraq, Libya, Somalia, Sudan, Syria and Yemen -- and all refugees for 120 days.
Trump´s move, which he justifies on security grounds, wrought havoc at airports across America, sparked protests and left countless people hoping to reach the United States in limbo.
"When a country is no longer able to say who can, and who cannot, come in & out, especially for reasons of safety &.security - big trouble!" Trump tweeted less than 12 hours after the court ruling was issued in Seattle.
He added that "certain Middle-Eastern countries agree with the ban. They know if certain people are allowed in it´s death & destruction!"
After the US court ruling, Swiss airline told AFP that "at the present time all passengers with valid travel documents can travel on any Swiss flights bound for the United States."
The carrier said it was in touch with US Customs and Border Protection and "we shall respect strictly conditions of entry into US territory."
Germany´s Lufthansa stated: "The United States federal court has blocked the travel ban to the USA with immediate effect. Visitors ... holding a valid immigrant or non-immigrant visa for the US are again allowed to travel to the USA".
In Teheran, one travel agent advised Iranians wishing to fly to the USA to "take a place to any city this evening," warning the repeal of the ban may not stand.
Some carriers, including Finnair, were waiting for official confirmation on where they stand, a spokeswoman told AFP.
Low cost carrier Norwegian pointed to "uncertainties about US entry regulations" and advised passengers with questions to contact the US embassy for more information as "we have to follow the rules" on who may enter.
The State Department said Friday up to 60,000 people from the seven targeted countries had their visas cancelled in light of a ban which has caused international outrage.
A Justice Department attorney told a court hearing in Virginia as many as 100,000 visas had been revoked.
US State Dept reverses Trump's visa ban
Home / World / US State Dept reverses Trump's visa ban
By REUTERS
February 04, 2017
Latest : World
WASHINGTON: The U.S. State Department will allow people with valid visas into the United States, a department official said on Saturday, in order to comply with an opinion from a federal judge in Seattle barring President Donald Trump's executive action.
"We have reversed the provisional revocation of visas," the State Department official said in a statement.
"Those individuals with visas that were not physically canceled may now travel if the visa is otherwise valid."
Citizens of seven Muslim countries who were banned from the United States by President Donald Trump can resume boarding U.S.-bound flights, the U.S. government said on Saturday, after a Seattle judge blocked his executive order.
The ruling gave hope to many travellers and sent some scrambling for tickets, worried that the newly opened window might not last long. Trump denounced the judge on Twitter and said the decision would be quashed.
"The opinion of this so-called judge, which essentially takes law-enforcement away from our country, is ridiculous and will be overturned!" the president said.
The travel ban, which Trump says is needed to protect the United States against militants, has sparked travel chaos around the world and condemnation by rights groups who have called it racist and discriminatory.
Home / World / Passengers get airline ok after US court stays Trump travel ban
By AFP
February 04, 2017
Latest : World
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PARIS: Several airlines on Saturday gave the green light to passengers wanting to fly to the United States who come from countries hit by President Donald Trump´s travel ban after a US court suspended his order.
Seattle US District Judge James Robart on Friday blocked Trump´s controversial ban on travelers from seven Muslim countries, prompting a furious president to condemn it as a "ridiculous" move which he would overturn.
Although some airlines said they were waiting to see how the situation develops, carriers including Air France, Qatar Airways, Lufthansa and Swiss Airways said they would carry nationals of the countries concerned if they have a valid visa.
Following the court ruling, US authorities Saturday suspended the travel ban.
"We have reversed the provisional revocation of visas," a State Department spokesman told AFP.
"Those individuals with visas that were not physically cancelled may now travel if the visa is otherwise valid," the official said, while a complaint against Trump´s decree by Washington state´s attorney general Bob Ferguson is officially reviewed.
Ferguson said Friday the court´s suspension of Trump´s order meant "the constitution prevailed" as "no one is above the law -- not even the president."
Trump responded angrily, tweeting that "the opinion of this so-called judge, which essentially takes law-enforcement away from our country, is ridiculous and will be overturned!"
Among airlines confirming the greenlighting of passengers with valid visas, Air France told AFP that "since this morning we are applying with immediate effect the (US) judicial decision taken overnight. All passengers presenting themselves will embark once their papers are in order to travel to the United States."
Several other airlines confirmed on their websites they would carry visa-holding passengers even before news emerged of the State Department statement.
Trump last week issued a shock executive order banning for 90 days entry into the US by nationals of seven mainly Muslim countries -- Iran, Iraq, Libya, Somalia, Sudan, Syria and Yemen -- and all refugees for 120 days.
Trump´s move, which he justifies on security grounds, wrought havoc at airports across America, sparked protests and left countless people hoping to reach the United States in limbo.
"When a country is no longer able to say who can, and who cannot, come in & out, especially for reasons of safety &.security - big trouble!" Trump tweeted less than 12 hours after the court ruling was issued in Seattle.
He added that "certain Middle-Eastern countries agree with the ban. They know if certain people are allowed in it´s death & destruction!"
After the US court ruling, Swiss airline told AFP that "at the present time all passengers with valid travel documents can travel on any Swiss flights bound for the United States."
The carrier said it was in touch with US Customs and Border Protection and "we shall respect strictly conditions of entry into US territory."
Germany´s Lufthansa stated: "The United States federal court has blocked the travel ban to the USA with immediate effect. Visitors ... holding a valid immigrant or non-immigrant visa for the US are again allowed to travel to the USA".
In Teheran, one travel agent advised Iranians wishing to fly to the USA to "take a place to any city this evening," warning the repeal of the ban may not stand.
Some carriers, including Finnair, were waiting for official confirmation on where they stand, a spokeswoman told AFP.
Low cost carrier Norwegian pointed to "uncertainties about US entry regulations" and advised passengers with questions to contact the US embassy for more information as "we have to follow the rules" on who may enter.
The State Department said Friday up to 60,000 people from the seven targeted countries had their visas cancelled in light of a ban which has caused international outrage.
A Justice Department attorney told a court hearing in Virginia as many as 100,000 visas had been revoked.
US State Dept reverses Trump's visa ban
Home / World / US State Dept reverses Trump's visa ban
By REUTERS
February 04, 2017
Latest : World
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WASHINGTON: The U.S. State Department will allow people with valid visas into the United States, a department official said on Saturday, in order to comply with an opinion from a federal judge in Seattle barring President Donald Trump's executive action.
"We have reversed the provisional revocation of visas," the State Department official said in a statement.
"Those individuals with visas that were not physically canceled may now travel if the visa is otherwise valid."
Citizens of seven Muslim countries who were banned from the United States by President Donald Trump can resume boarding U.S.-bound flights, the U.S. government said on Saturday, after a Seattle judge blocked his executive order.
The ruling gave hope to many travellers and sent some scrambling for tickets, worried that the newly opened window might not last long. Trump denounced the judge on Twitter and said the decision would be quashed.
"The opinion of this so-called judge, which essentially takes law-enforcement away from our country, is ridiculous and will be overturned!" the president said.
The travel ban, which Trump says is needed to protect the United States against militants, has sparked travel chaos around the world and condemnation by rights groups who have called it racist and discriminatory.
Devil Soul
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Trump’s secret immigration policy targets 8 million deportations
Home / World / Trump’s secret immigration policy targets 8 million deportations
By Web Desk
February 05, 2017
Latest : World
LOS ANGELES: US President Donald Trump is working on a new immigration policy under which the new admin has stripped away most restrictions on who should be deported, opening the door for deportations on a very large scale, Los Angeles Times reported.
According to calculations by the LA Times, up to 8 million people in the US illegally could be considered priorities for deportation. The estimate is based on interviews with experts who studied the order and two internal documents that signal immigration officials are taking an expansive view of Trump’s directive.
Far from targeting only “bad hombres,” as Trump has said repeatedly, his new order allows immigration agents to detain nearly anyone they come in contact with who has crossed the border illegally. People could be booked into custody for using food stamps or if their child receives free school lunches.
The Trump admin targets to deport a ‘much larger group than those swept up in the travel bans’ the report said.
“We are going back to enforcement chaos — they are going to give lip service to going after criminals, but they really are going to round up everybody they can get their hands on,” said David Leopold, a former president of the American Immigration Lawyers Assn. and an immigration lawyer for more than two decades.
An additional executive order under consideration would block entry to anyone the US believes may use benefit programs such as Medicaid and the Children's Health Insurance Program, according two Trump administration officials who have seen the draft order.
In late January, Trump’s immigration policy experts gave a 20-page document to top Homeland Security officials that lays out how to ramp up immigration enforcement, according to two people familiar with the memo.
The instructions also propose allowing Border Patrol agents to provide translation assistance to local law enforcement, a practice that was stopped in 2012 over concerns that it was contributing to racial profiling.
In addition, Homeland Security officials have circulated an 11-page memo on how to enact Trump’s order. Among other steps, that document suggests expanding the use of a deportation process that bypasses immigration courts and allows officers to expel foreigners immediately upon capture.
By giving more authority to immigration officers, Trump has put his administration on track to boost deportations more than 75% in his first full year in office. That would meet the level set in 2012, at the end of Obama’s first term, when more than 400,000 people were deported. It dropped to some 235,000 last year after illegal immigration fell and agents were given narrowed deportation targets.
In addition, Trump plans to empower local police to work with immigration agents to identify people they believe live illegally in their cities and towns, particularly those seen as violent, the White House official said, comparing the arrest of a suspected gang leader on an immigration violation to the FBI charging a mafia leader with tax evasion.
“The great thing about immigration law is it is a preventative law enforcement tool,” the official said.
Home / World / Trump’s secret immigration policy targets 8 million deportations
By Web Desk
February 05, 2017
Latest : World
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LOS ANGELES: US President Donald Trump is working on a new immigration policy under which the new admin has stripped away most restrictions on who should be deported, opening the door for deportations on a very large scale, Los Angeles Times reported.
According to calculations by the LA Times, up to 8 million people in the US illegally could be considered priorities for deportation. The estimate is based on interviews with experts who studied the order and two internal documents that signal immigration officials are taking an expansive view of Trump’s directive.
Far from targeting only “bad hombres,” as Trump has said repeatedly, his new order allows immigration agents to detain nearly anyone they come in contact with who has crossed the border illegally. People could be booked into custody for using food stamps or if their child receives free school lunches.
The Trump admin targets to deport a ‘much larger group than those swept up in the travel bans’ the report said.
“We are going back to enforcement chaos — they are going to give lip service to going after criminals, but they really are going to round up everybody they can get their hands on,” said David Leopold, a former president of the American Immigration Lawyers Assn. and an immigration lawyer for more than two decades.
An additional executive order under consideration would block entry to anyone the US believes may use benefit programs such as Medicaid and the Children's Health Insurance Program, according two Trump administration officials who have seen the draft order.
In late January, Trump’s immigration policy experts gave a 20-page document to top Homeland Security officials that lays out how to ramp up immigration enforcement, according to two people familiar with the memo.
The instructions also propose allowing Border Patrol agents to provide translation assistance to local law enforcement, a practice that was stopped in 2012 over concerns that it was contributing to racial profiling.
In addition, Homeland Security officials have circulated an 11-page memo on how to enact Trump’s order. Among other steps, that document suggests expanding the use of a deportation process that bypasses immigration courts and allows officers to expel foreigners immediately upon capture.
By giving more authority to immigration officers, Trump has put his administration on track to boost deportations more than 75% in his first full year in office. That would meet the level set in 2012, at the end of Obama’s first term, when more than 400,000 people were deported. It dropped to some 235,000 last year after illegal immigration fell and agents were given narrowed deportation targets.
In addition, Trump plans to empower local police to work with immigration agents to identify people they believe live illegally in their cities and towns, particularly those seen as violent, the White House official said, comparing the arrest of a suspected gang leader on an immigration violation to the FBI charging a mafia leader with tax evasion.
“The great thing about immigration law is it is a preventative law enforcement tool,” the official said.
F-22Raptor
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WEST PALM BEACH, Fla. — A federal appeals court early Sunday rejected a request by the Justice Department to immediately restore President Trump’s targeted travel ban, deepening a legal showdown over his authority to tighten the nation’s borders in the name of protecting Americans from terrorism.
In the legal back and forth over the travel ban, the United States Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit in San Francisco said a reply from the Trump administration was now due on Monday.
The ruling meant that refugees and travelers from seven predominantly Muslim nations — Iran, Iraq, Libya, Somalia, Sudan, Syria and Yemen — who were barred by an executive order signed by the president on Jan. 27 would, for now, continue to be able to enter the country.
After a Federal District Court in Seattle blocked Mr. Trump’s order nationwide on Friday, the Justice Department appealed the ruling late Saturday, saying that the president had the constitutional authority to order the ban and that the court ruling “second-guesses the president’s national security judgment.”
On Saturday night, as Mr. Trump arrived at a Red Cross gala at Mar-a-Lago, his waterfront Florida resort, where he was spending the first getaway weekend of his presidency, reporters asked him if he was confident he would prevail in the government’s appeal. “We’ll win,” he replied. “For the safety of the country, we’ll win.”
The legal maneuvering led Mr. Trump to lash out at Judge James Robart of the Federal District Court in Seattle throughout the day, prompting criticism that the president had failed to respect the judicial branch and its power to check on his authority.
In a Twitter post on Saturday, Mr. Trump wrote, “The opinion of this so-called judge, which essentially takes law-enforcement away from our country, is ridiculous and will be overturned!”
The Justice Department’s filing sought to have the United States Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit block the Seattle judge’s decision and asked that the lower court’s ruling be stayed pending the appeal.
In its argument for an appeal, the Justice Department had said the president had an “unreviewable authority” to suspend the entry of any class of foreigners. It said the ruling by Judge Robart was too broad, “untethered” to the claims of the State of Washington, and in conflict with a ruling by another federal district judge, in Boston, who had upheld the order.
The Justice Department argued that the president acted well within his constitutional authority. Blocking the order, it concluded, “immediately harms the public by thwarting enforcement of an Executive Order issued by the President, based on his national security judgment.”
Judge Robart, who was appointed by President George W. Bush, declared in his ruling on Friday that “there’s no support” for the administration’s argument that “we have to protect the U.S. from individuals” from the affected countries.
His ruling also barred the administration from enforcing its limits on accepting refugees. The State Department said Saturday that refugees, including Syrians, could begin arriving as early as Monday. Syrians had faced an indefinite ban under the executive order.
The Ninth Circuit court moved quickly to reject the administration’s appeal, a measure of the urgency and intense interest in the case.
Despite Mr. Trump’s vehement criticism of the ruling and the certainty that it would be appealed, the government agencies at the center of the issue, the State Department and the Department of Homeland Security, moved quickly to comply.
Lawrence Bartlett, the State Department’s director of refugee resettlement, wrote in a departmental email that officials were working to rebook travel for refugees who had previously been scheduled to leave for the United States over a three-week period that will end Feb. 17. A State Department official said the extended time frame accounted for the fact that some refugees will have to make difficult journeys back to airports from refugee camps.
A United Nations spokesman, Leonard Doyle, said about 2,000 refugees were ready to travel.
Airlines, citing American customs officials, were telling passengers from the seven countries that their visas were once again valid. Those carriers, however, have yet to report an uptick in travel, and there appeared to be no rush to airports by visa holders in Europe and the Middle East intent on making their way to the United States.
Etihad Airways, the United Arab Emirates’ national carrier, said in a statement: “Following advice received today from the U.S. Customs and Border Protection unit at Abu Dhabi Airport, the airline will again be accepting nationals from the seven countries named last week.” Other Arab carriers, including Qatar Airways, issued similar statements.
A group of advocacy organizations that had worked to overturn the executive order and help immigrants and refugees stranded at airports issued a statement on Saturday afternoon encouraging travelers “to rebook travel to the United States immediately.”
“We have been in contact with hundreds of people impacted by the ban, and we are urging them to get on planes as quickly as possible,” Clare Kane, a law student intern at the Jerome N. Frank Legal Services Organization at Yale Law School, one of the groups involved, said in a statement.
But some officials were being more cautious, advising travelers to wait for further clarity. The American Embassy in Baghdad said it was waiting for additional guidance from Washington. “We don’t know what the effect will be, but we’re working to get more information,” the embassy told The Associated Press in a statement.
The Department of Homeland Security said it had suspended implementation of the order, including procedures to flag travelers from the countries designated in Mr. Trump’s order. It said it would resume standard inspection procedures. But in a statement, the department defended the order as “lawful and appropriate.”
In his first statement on the matter on Friday evening, the White House press secretary, Sean Spicer, described the Seattle judge’s action as “outrageous.” Minutes later, the White House issued a new statement deleting the word outrageous.
Mr. Trump’s Twitter post showed no such restraint. It recalled the attacks he made during the presidential campaign on a federal district judge in California who was presiding over a class-action lawsuit involving Trump University.
Democrats said the president’s criticism of Judge Robart was a dangerous development. Senator Patrick J. Leahy of Vermont, a member of the Judiciary Committee, said in a statement that Mr. Trump seemed “intent on precipitating a constitutional crisis.” Gov. Jay Inslee of Washington, whose state filed the suit that led to the injunction, said the attack was “beneath the dignity” of the presidency and could “lead America to calamity.”
Senator Chuck Schumer of New York, the Democratic leader, said in a statement that Mr. Trump’s outburst could weigh on the confirmation process for Judge Neil M. Gorsuch, the president’s nominee for the Supreme Court.
Until now, Mr. Trump had been comparatively restrained about the multiple federal judges who have ruled against parts of his immigration order, even as he staunchly defended its legality. Some analysts had speculated that he did not want a repeat of the storm during the campaign when he accused Judge Gonzalo P. Curiel of having a conflict of interest in the Trump University case because the judge’s family was of Mexican heritage. Mr. Trump, who had painted Mexicans as rapists and criminals, settled that case after the election.
But on Saturday morning, Mr. Trump let loose, and in the afternoon he unleashed another volley of attacks on the ruling. In one Twitter message, he questioned why a judge could “halt a Homeland Security travel ban,” which would allow “anyone, even with bad intentions,” to enter the country. An hour later, he complained about the “terrible decision,” saying it would let “many very bad and dangerous people” pour into the country.
Earlier, Mr. Trump had asserted, without evidence, that some Middle Eastern countries supported the immigration order. “Interesting that certain Middle-Eastern countries agree with the ban,” he wrote. “They know that if certain people are allowed in it’s death & destruction!”
The Washington State case was filed on Monday, and it was assigned to Judge Robart that day. He asked for briefs on whether the state had standing to sue, with the last one due on Thursday. On Wednesday, Minnesota joined the suit.
On Friday evening, Judge Robart issued a temporary restraining order, requiring the government to revert to its previous immigration policies as the case moved forward. He found that the states and their citizens had been injured by Mr. Trump’s order.
“The executive order adversely affects the states’ residents in areas of employment, education, business, family relations and freedom to travel,” Judge Robart wrote. He said the states had been hurt because the order affected their public universities and their tax bases.
Still, Judge Robart’s order left many questions, said Josh Blackman, a professor at South Texas College of Law in Houston.
“Does the executive order violate the equal protection of the laws, amount to an establishment of religion, violate rights of free exercise, or deprive aliens of due process of law?” Professor Blackman asked. “Who knows? The analysis is bare bones, and leaves the court of appeals, as well as the Supreme Court, with no basis to determine whether the nationwide injunction was proper.”
While large crowds had yet to materialize at airports, there were individual stories of people trying to enter the country.
Nael Zaino, 32, a Syrian who had tried unsuccessfully for nearly a week to fly to the United States to join his wife and American-born son, was allowed to board a flight from Istanbul and then Frankfurt late Friday. He landed in Boston around 1 p.m. Saturday and emerged from immigration two hours later, said his sister-in-law Katty Alhayek.
Mr. Zaino was believed to be among the first revoked visa holders to enter the United States since the executive order went into effect. His advocates had sought a waiver for him from the State Department, citing family reunification. “Mine must be a very special case,” Mr. Zaino said by phone from Istanbul.
Iranians, many of them students on their way to American universities, also rushed to book flights to transfer destinations in other Persian Gulf countries, Turkey and Europe. Pedram Paragomi, a 33-year-old Iranian medical student bound for the University of Pittsburgh, who had been caught up in the initial chaos over the travel ban, flew to Frankfurt on Saturday, where he was to transfer to a flight to Boston.
“I’m anxious,” he said from Frankfurt. “The rules keep on changing, but I think I will make it this time.”
https://www.nytimes.com/2017/02/04/us/politics/visa-ban-trump-judge-james-robart.html?_r=0
In the legal back and forth over the travel ban, the United States Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit in San Francisco said a reply from the Trump administration was now due on Monday.
The ruling meant that refugees and travelers from seven predominantly Muslim nations — Iran, Iraq, Libya, Somalia, Sudan, Syria and Yemen — who were barred by an executive order signed by the president on Jan. 27 would, for now, continue to be able to enter the country.
After a Federal District Court in Seattle blocked Mr. Trump’s order nationwide on Friday, the Justice Department appealed the ruling late Saturday, saying that the president had the constitutional authority to order the ban and that the court ruling “second-guesses the president’s national security judgment.”
On Saturday night, as Mr. Trump arrived at a Red Cross gala at Mar-a-Lago, his waterfront Florida resort, where he was spending the first getaway weekend of his presidency, reporters asked him if he was confident he would prevail in the government’s appeal. “We’ll win,” he replied. “For the safety of the country, we’ll win.”
The legal maneuvering led Mr. Trump to lash out at Judge James Robart of the Federal District Court in Seattle throughout the day, prompting criticism that the president had failed to respect the judicial branch and its power to check on his authority.
In a Twitter post on Saturday, Mr. Trump wrote, “The opinion of this so-called judge, which essentially takes law-enforcement away from our country, is ridiculous and will be overturned!”
The Justice Department’s filing sought to have the United States Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit block the Seattle judge’s decision and asked that the lower court’s ruling be stayed pending the appeal.
In its argument for an appeal, the Justice Department had said the president had an “unreviewable authority” to suspend the entry of any class of foreigners. It said the ruling by Judge Robart was too broad, “untethered” to the claims of the State of Washington, and in conflict with a ruling by another federal district judge, in Boston, who had upheld the order.
The Justice Department argued that the president acted well within his constitutional authority. Blocking the order, it concluded, “immediately harms the public by thwarting enforcement of an Executive Order issued by the President, based on his national security judgment.”
Judge Robart, who was appointed by President George W. Bush, declared in his ruling on Friday that “there’s no support” for the administration’s argument that “we have to protect the U.S. from individuals” from the affected countries.
His ruling also barred the administration from enforcing its limits on accepting refugees. The State Department said Saturday that refugees, including Syrians, could begin arriving as early as Monday. Syrians had faced an indefinite ban under the executive order.
The Ninth Circuit court moved quickly to reject the administration’s appeal, a measure of the urgency and intense interest in the case.
Despite Mr. Trump’s vehement criticism of the ruling and the certainty that it would be appealed, the government agencies at the center of the issue, the State Department and the Department of Homeland Security, moved quickly to comply.
Lawrence Bartlett, the State Department’s director of refugee resettlement, wrote in a departmental email that officials were working to rebook travel for refugees who had previously been scheduled to leave for the United States over a three-week period that will end Feb. 17. A State Department official said the extended time frame accounted for the fact that some refugees will have to make difficult journeys back to airports from refugee camps.
A United Nations spokesman, Leonard Doyle, said about 2,000 refugees were ready to travel.
Airlines, citing American customs officials, were telling passengers from the seven countries that their visas were once again valid. Those carriers, however, have yet to report an uptick in travel, and there appeared to be no rush to airports by visa holders in Europe and the Middle East intent on making their way to the United States.
Etihad Airways, the United Arab Emirates’ national carrier, said in a statement: “Following advice received today from the U.S. Customs and Border Protection unit at Abu Dhabi Airport, the airline will again be accepting nationals from the seven countries named last week.” Other Arab carriers, including Qatar Airways, issued similar statements.
A group of advocacy organizations that had worked to overturn the executive order and help immigrants and refugees stranded at airports issued a statement on Saturday afternoon encouraging travelers “to rebook travel to the United States immediately.”
“We have been in contact with hundreds of people impacted by the ban, and we are urging them to get on planes as quickly as possible,” Clare Kane, a law student intern at the Jerome N. Frank Legal Services Organization at Yale Law School, one of the groups involved, said in a statement.
But some officials were being more cautious, advising travelers to wait for further clarity. The American Embassy in Baghdad said it was waiting for additional guidance from Washington. “We don’t know what the effect will be, but we’re working to get more information,” the embassy told The Associated Press in a statement.
The Department of Homeland Security said it had suspended implementation of the order, including procedures to flag travelers from the countries designated in Mr. Trump’s order. It said it would resume standard inspection procedures. But in a statement, the department defended the order as “lawful and appropriate.”
In his first statement on the matter on Friday evening, the White House press secretary, Sean Spicer, described the Seattle judge’s action as “outrageous.” Minutes later, the White House issued a new statement deleting the word outrageous.
Mr. Trump’s Twitter post showed no such restraint. It recalled the attacks he made during the presidential campaign on a federal district judge in California who was presiding over a class-action lawsuit involving Trump University.
Democrats said the president’s criticism of Judge Robart was a dangerous development. Senator Patrick J. Leahy of Vermont, a member of the Judiciary Committee, said in a statement that Mr. Trump seemed “intent on precipitating a constitutional crisis.” Gov. Jay Inslee of Washington, whose state filed the suit that led to the injunction, said the attack was “beneath the dignity” of the presidency and could “lead America to calamity.”
Senator Chuck Schumer of New York, the Democratic leader, said in a statement that Mr. Trump’s outburst could weigh on the confirmation process for Judge Neil M. Gorsuch, the president’s nominee for the Supreme Court.
Until now, Mr. Trump had been comparatively restrained about the multiple federal judges who have ruled against parts of his immigration order, even as he staunchly defended its legality. Some analysts had speculated that he did not want a repeat of the storm during the campaign when he accused Judge Gonzalo P. Curiel of having a conflict of interest in the Trump University case because the judge’s family was of Mexican heritage. Mr. Trump, who had painted Mexicans as rapists and criminals, settled that case after the election.
But on Saturday morning, Mr. Trump let loose, and in the afternoon he unleashed another volley of attacks on the ruling. In one Twitter message, he questioned why a judge could “halt a Homeland Security travel ban,” which would allow “anyone, even with bad intentions,” to enter the country. An hour later, he complained about the “terrible decision,” saying it would let “many very bad and dangerous people” pour into the country.
Earlier, Mr. Trump had asserted, without evidence, that some Middle Eastern countries supported the immigration order. “Interesting that certain Middle-Eastern countries agree with the ban,” he wrote. “They know that if certain people are allowed in it’s death & destruction!”
The Washington State case was filed on Monday, and it was assigned to Judge Robart that day. He asked for briefs on whether the state had standing to sue, with the last one due on Thursday. On Wednesday, Minnesota joined the suit.
On Friday evening, Judge Robart issued a temporary restraining order, requiring the government to revert to its previous immigration policies as the case moved forward. He found that the states and their citizens had been injured by Mr. Trump’s order.
“The executive order adversely affects the states’ residents in areas of employment, education, business, family relations and freedom to travel,” Judge Robart wrote. He said the states had been hurt because the order affected their public universities and their tax bases.
Still, Judge Robart’s order left many questions, said Josh Blackman, a professor at South Texas College of Law in Houston.
“Does the executive order violate the equal protection of the laws, amount to an establishment of religion, violate rights of free exercise, or deprive aliens of due process of law?” Professor Blackman asked. “Who knows? The analysis is bare bones, and leaves the court of appeals, as well as the Supreme Court, with no basis to determine whether the nationwide injunction was proper.”
While large crowds had yet to materialize at airports, there were individual stories of people trying to enter the country.
Nael Zaino, 32, a Syrian who had tried unsuccessfully for nearly a week to fly to the United States to join his wife and American-born son, was allowed to board a flight from Istanbul and then Frankfurt late Friday. He landed in Boston around 1 p.m. Saturday and emerged from immigration two hours later, said his sister-in-law Katty Alhayek.
Mr. Zaino was believed to be among the first revoked visa holders to enter the United States since the executive order went into effect. His advocates had sought a waiver for him from the State Department, citing family reunification. “Mine must be a very special case,” Mr. Zaino said by phone from Istanbul.
Iranians, many of them students on their way to American universities, also rushed to book flights to transfer destinations in other Persian Gulf countries, Turkey and Europe. Pedram Paragomi, a 33-year-old Iranian medical student bound for the University of Pittsburgh, who had been caught up in the initial chaos over the travel ban, flew to Frankfurt on Saturday, where he was to transfer to a flight to Boston.
“I’m anxious,” he said from Frankfurt. “The rules keep on changing, but I think I will make it this time.”
https://www.nytimes.com/2017/02/04/us/politics/visa-ban-trump-judge-james-robart.html?_r=0
F-22Raptor
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On days like this, we understand why the US Constitution was such a groundbreaking document and still is to this day 230 years later.
Providence
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I hope sense prevails !
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what an awful sh*tshow...
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Resettlement of Displaced Pakistani Christian Refugee Family Delayed by Trump Order
http://www.christianpost.com/news/r...efugee-family-delayed-by-trump-order-174174/#
BY SAMUEL SMITH , CP REPORTER
Feb 3, 2017 | 4:35 PM
A refugee family of four who fled from one of the most dangerous countries in the world to live as Christians was relieved to find out that after years of living as marginalized refugees in Thailand, they were finally approved by the U.S. government to be resettled in New Mexico this month.
image: http://d.christianpost.com/full/91538/590-393/img.jpg
(Photo: Reuters/Damir Sagolj)Pakistani refugees in Thailand in this undated photo.
But like the thousands of other refugees who have so patiently waited through the U.S.' lengthy and complex refugee vetting process that takes a minimum of 18 months to clear, the family was disappointed to learn last week that President Donald Trump issued a controversial executive order suspending all refugee resettlement to the United States for a period of 120 days.
Displaced 43-year-old Pakistani Christian Cyril Kamran, his wife, Samina, and two kids (aged 17 and 9), fled Pakistan in December 2013 and sought safety in the Asian nation of Thailand, where they have been living ever since.
Although Open Doors USA ranks Pakistan as the fourth most dangerous nation in the world when it comes to Christian persecution, Human Rights Watch reports that Thailand's refugee policies make refugees in the country "vulnerable to arbitrary and abusive treatment."
As Kamran and his wife both face deteriorating health conditions, Thailand's policies prevent them from getting jobs and from being able to support their family. However, there was nowhere else for the family to go.
In fact, the Thai government is now trying to fine the family upwards of about $1,700 for being illegal immigrants who have overstayed their initial three-month visa. If the family doesn't pay the fine, then all four of them could be forced to spend one week detained at an immigration detention center.
"Majority of the [refugees] don't have the visas and if you don't have visa that means you are under constant threat," Kamran told The Christian Post in an email exchange coordinated by the London-based charity British Pakistani Christian Association. "We are still experiencing this fear on daily bases. Your children cannot go out for play and you live in your apartment all the time with the doors locked from outside most of the time."
"There are no job opportunities for us. If you are caught during work then again, it's a big problem for employee and employers," he added. "Employers exploited our status and sometimes they didn't pay anything at the end of the month and threaten asylum seekers and the refugee community [by saying] 'If you ask for money, we will call the police and they will arrest you.'"
According to BPCA, Kamran and his family represent a rare instance in which a Pakistani Christian refugee family received approval from the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees to be resettled.
Kamran told CP that the family participated in a cultural orientation course at a resettlement support center on Jan. 26 and were told that they would receive a travel plan in two to three weeks following the course.
Kamran said that the family was expecting to finally be resettled in the United States sometime in February.
"All the steps for resettlement is done and we are only waiting for the tickets," he explained. "They informed us that we are going to Albuquerque, New Mexico."
Although they took part in the orientation course last Thursday, it was the next day that Trump announced that he would ban refugee resettlement from all countries for 120 days in order for a review of the refugee vetting process to take place.
image: http://d.christianpost.com/full/96457/590-391/img.jpg
(Photo: Reuters/Mohsin Raza)Women from the Christian community mourn for their relatives, who were killed by a suicide attack on a church, during their funeral in Lahore, March 17, 2015. Suicide bombings outside two churches in Lahore killed 14 people and wounded nearly 80 others during services on Sunday in attacks claimed by a faction of the Pakistani Taliban.
This meant that although the Kamran family could finally begin to see the light at the end of their resettlement tunnel, they will probably have to wait at least another four months before they can experience the freedoms that the U.S. has to offer.
Following the issuance of the executive order, prominent evangelical refugee resettlement organization World Relief and other evangelical groups came out against the order, which also indefinitely bans the resettlement of Syrian refugees.
image: http://d.christianpost.com/full/101537/80-44-51-34/robert-jeffress-l-and-donald-trump.jpg
Robert Jeffress: Christian Refugees Should Be Given Preference Over Muslim Refugees
image: http://d.christianpost.com/full/103151/80-44/refugee-ban.jpg
Syrian Christians in Pennsylvania Back Refugee Ban: 'Trump Is Right'
image: http://d.christianpost.com/full/103277/80-44/donald-trump-refugee-travel-ban.jpg
Donald Trump's Refugee Travel Ban Makes Us Safer Say A Third of Americans - Reuters/Ipsos Poll
image: http://d.christianpost.com/full/103207/80-44/refugees.jpg
Refugee Vetting Process Is Not Broken, Evangelical Resettlement Group Warns
Matthew Soerens, World Relief's U.S. director of church mobilization, warned in an interview with The Christian Post earlier this week that although Trump's order seeks to increase safety in vetting of refugees from nations with strong terror presence, the current U.S. refugee vetting process is quite adequate.
"It's incredibly selective program to where if there are any doubts about someone's identity or their claims to refugee status or if there is a hint of concern that they might be a threat to public safety in the United States, they are excluded," Soerens explained.
Now Kamran and his family are at risk of having to stay a week at the immigration detention center in Thailand, as they likely will not be able to afford their overstay fine.
"The conditions of IDC, health conditions are very bad. As I work once a month at Tzu Chi free community clinic as an interpreter and the maximum of the patients who came out on bail from IDC even in the last year, they all have so many skin problems. Scabies is the most common disease," Kamran told BPCA in an earlier interview. "Patients of Scabies are still fighting with these issues after [being] bailed out from IDC. A room for 20 to 30 is filled with 80 to 90 detainees. They also cut down the water supply for days they treated asylum seekers and refugees like animals."
"My daughter is 17 years old and we are unable to take risk to send her to IDC because in past, we heard so many sexual harassment cases in IDC," he added.
Collaborating with other groups, BPCA is accepting donations to raise money to help pay the family's fines so that they do not have to go the detention center.
Kamran and his family are not the only Pakistani Christians seeking refuge in Thailand. BPCA documented the struggles of numerous Pakistani Christians living in the Asian country.
Read more at http://www.christianpost.com/news/r...ed-by-trump-order-174174/#pCThQSc9aWrGxOCi.99
Providence
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I hope this guy's staff ain't filled with 'Yes' men only.
Trump’s Travel Ban, Aimed at Terrorists, Has Blocked Doctors
By DONALD G. McNEIL Jr.FEB. 6, 2017
Dr. Naeem Moulki at Regions Hospital in St. Paul, Minn. Originally from Syria, Dr. Moulki is due to begin a cardiology fellowship in Chicago later this year if his visa is extended.CreditJenn Ackerman for The New York Times
The Trump administration has mounted a vigorous defense of its ban on travel from seven majority-Muslim nations, saying it is necessary to prevent terrorists from entering the United States. But the ban, now blocked by a federal judge, also ensnared travelers important to the well-being of many Americans: doctors.
Foreign-born physicians have become crucial to the delivery of medical care in the United States. They work in small towns where there are no other doctors, in poor urban neighborhoods and in Veterans Affairs hospitals.
Forty-two percent of office visits in rural America are with foreign-born physicians, according to the American Academy of Family Physicians.
Foreign-born physicians “are the doctors in small towns in Maine and Iowa,” said Dr. Patricia F. Walker, the associate director of the University of Minnesota’s Global Health Pathway, which helps refugee doctors practice in the United States.
“They go to the places where graduates of Harvard Medical School don’t want to go,” she said.
Across the United States, more than 15,000 doctors are from the seven Muslim-majority countries covered by the travel ban, according to Medicus, a firm that recruits doctors for hard-to-fill jobs. That includes almost 9,000 from Iran, almost 3,500 from Syria and more than 1,500 from Iraq.
Dr. Hooman Parsi, an oncologist so talented that he has an O-1 visa granted to individuals with “extraordinarily ability or achievement,” was to start seeing patients on Wednesday in San Bernardino, Calif.
A federal judge in Seattle lifted the administration’s travel ban on Friday, and a federal appeals court has declined to restore it. Yet Dr. Parsi is still stuck in Iran, waiting for a delayed visa amid the confusion while his American employer fumes.
“We need him desperately,” said Dr. Richy Agajanian, the managing partner of the Oncology Institute of Hope and Innovation, which had just hired him. “We had an office completely constructed — we spent three months on it, and it was supposed to open Feb. 1. Now we can’t open it. This is really sad and frustrating.”
The 30-doctor practice does a lot of work in the Inland Empire, in San Bernardino and Riverside Counties, Dr. Agajanian noted. “It’s very sparse in doctors out there — many miles between oncologists,” he said. “The patients he would be seeing have to travel another 25 miles now. Our doctors are already overworked, and now they’ll have to be on call more often.”
The United States has a persistent doctor shortage, despite the fact that 31 new medical schools have opened since 2002 and many existing ones have increased class sizes, according to Merritt Hawkins, a Dallas-based medical recruiting firm.
It also noted that there are 22 percent more residencies available each year than there are American graduates to take them. Graduates of foreign medical schools now fill that gap; the largest number come from India, followed by Pakistan, China, the Philippines, Iran and Israel.
(Iran is on Mr. Trump’s exclusion list; Pakistan, a Muslim-majority country with a history of internal and external terror attacks, is not.)
Many foreign graduates have J-1 visas, which give them about three years to complete their residencies. “They must pass licensing exams and they must do a residency to practice here, even if they’re superstars where they come from,” said Phillip Miller, a Merritt Hawkins spokesman.
Foreign-born graduates have often worked at world-class institutions and have published academic papers, so they have higher average scores than American graduates on the medical knowledge portions of the licensing examinations, according to Merritt Hawkins research — though most initially score lower on the clinical skills portions, which include English and communication skills.
“I had to work my butt off to get here,” said Dr. Abdelghani el Rafei, a first-year resident at the University of Minnesota. “They only take the top graduates from schools in countries like mine.”
Such foreign-born graduates must return home when their visas expire, but they can get extensions if they agree to work in an area that the Department of Health and Human Services considers “medically underserved,” which is roughly defined as having less than one primary care doctor for every 3,000 people.
Those who practice in an underserved area for several years can apply for green cards. “After that, they can practice anywhere, but at least you’ve had three or four years of a physician in your town, and that’s pretty significant,” Mr. Miller said.
Citing figures from the Iowa Board of Medicine, The Des Moines Register reported last week that 172 doctors practicing in Iowa were from the seven countries subject to Mr. Trump’s travel ban, and that 23 percent of the state’s 13,000 practicing doctors were born outside the United States.
Andrea Clement, a spokeswoman for Medicus, said that 76 percent of the foreign doctors it placed last year had gone to areas with fewer than 25,000 people or to small to medium-size cities of 25,000 to 500,000.
It placed more foreign doctors in Wisconsin than in any other state, she said, followed by California, Texas, Maryland, Oregon, Missouri, Tennessee, Ohio and Arizona.
Some urban areas are medically underserved, too. While Manhattan’s Upper East Side has five times the number of doctors it needs to be adequately served under federal guidelines, parts of the Bronx and Brooklyn have acute doctor shortages.
More than 150,000 residents of Brooklyn’s Bedford-Stuyvesant section, for example, are rated as medically underserved under federal guidelines. One of the doctors stranded overseas last week, according to Pro Publica, was Dr. Kamal Fadlalla, an internal medicine specialist from Sudan who is a second-year resident at Interfaith Medical Center, which serves Bedford-Stuyvesant and Crown Heights.
Many foreign-born doctors, experts said, go into family medicine, pediatrics, internal medicine, general surgery and other front-line specialties where they see thousands of patients a year, including many on Medicare and Medicaid, rather than pursuing lucrative urban specialties like plastic surgery.
As an oncologist, Dr. Parsi was an exception. He moved to the United States in 2007 for postdoctoral work in molecular biology. Then, after passing his medical exam, he completed his residency at the University of Cincinnati and a fellowship in hematology and oncology at the University of Pittsburgh Medical Center.
Because he had to leave the country to get his new visa stamped into his passport, he had flown to Dubai. He cleared a security vetting there, he said, but had to wait a few days for the visa, so he flew to Tehran to see his father.
But the new court ruling affects only those who had current visa stamps in their passport, so even though he is being issued a new visa, he still cannot return to the United States, he said on Saturday.
“Everyone, including me, would like to keep the bad people out,” said Dr. Naeem Moulki, a Syrian citizen who is finishing his medical residency in Minneapolis and plans to begin a cardiology fellowship in Chicago in the fall. “But this is not the best way to do it. If I have to leave, it affects my patients.”
Dr. El Rafei said that the ban, which means he cannot go home to see his family, had depressed him.
“I felt like I was back in Syria again,” he said. “You feel hunted there, as if you did something wrong, even if you didn’t. Now I feel the same way here.”
He sees patients one day a week at the V.A. Hospital in Minneapolis, where he is sometimes asked where he is from.
“One of my patients, he was a veteran in his 60s, said to me, ‘Why do you people hate us?’’’ he said. “I told him about Syria. I said, ‘We don’t hate you. The bad people you see on TV are the same people who make us suffer, too.’”
“I love this country,” he added. “There’s a time in our residency when we can work in Africa or someplace. I want to work in a small American town, to show people that we’re not all bad. The U.S. gives us a lot, so we want to give back what we can.”
https://www.nytimes.com/2017/02/06/health/trump-travel-ban-doctors.html?smid=tw-nytimes&smtyp=cur&_r=0
There really should have been a lot more thought put into this. But, President Bannon wanted to grandstand - so there we are...
By DONALD G. McNEIL Jr.FEB. 6, 2017
Dr. Naeem Moulki at Regions Hospital in St. Paul, Minn. Originally from Syria, Dr. Moulki is due to begin a cardiology fellowship in Chicago later this year if his visa is extended.CreditJenn Ackerman for The New York Times
The Trump administration has mounted a vigorous defense of its ban on travel from seven majority-Muslim nations, saying it is necessary to prevent terrorists from entering the United States. But the ban, now blocked by a federal judge, also ensnared travelers important to the well-being of many Americans: doctors.
Foreign-born physicians have become crucial to the delivery of medical care in the United States. They work in small towns where there are no other doctors, in poor urban neighborhoods and in Veterans Affairs hospitals.
Forty-two percent of office visits in rural America are with foreign-born physicians, according to the American Academy of Family Physicians.
Foreign-born physicians “are the doctors in small towns in Maine and Iowa,” said Dr. Patricia F. Walker, the associate director of the University of Minnesota’s Global Health Pathway, which helps refugee doctors practice in the United States.
“They go to the places where graduates of Harvard Medical School don’t want to go,” she said.
Across the United States, more than 15,000 doctors are from the seven Muslim-majority countries covered by the travel ban, according to Medicus, a firm that recruits doctors for hard-to-fill jobs. That includes almost 9,000 from Iran, almost 3,500 from Syria and more than 1,500 from Iraq.
Dr. Hooman Parsi, an oncologist so talented that he has an O-1 visa granted to individuals with “extraordinarily ability or achievement,” was to start seeing patients on Wednesday in San Bernardino, Calif.
A federal judge in Seattle lifted the administration’s travel ban on Friday, and a federal appeals court has declined to restore it. Yet Dr. Parsi is still stuck in Iran, waiting for a delayed visa amid the confusion while his American employer fumes.
“We need him desperately,” said Dr. Richy Agajanian, the managing partner of the Oncology Institute of Hope and Innovation, which had just hired him. “We had an office completely constructed — we spent three months on it, and it was supposed to open Feb. 1. Now we can’t open it. This is really sad and frustrating.”
The 30-doctor practice does a lot of work in the Inland Empire, in San Bernardino and Riverside Counties, Dr. Agajanian noted. “It’s very sparse in doctors out there — many miles between oncologists,” he said. “The patients he would be seeing have to travel another 25 miles now. Our doctors are already overworked, and now they’ll have to be on call more often.”
The United States has a persistent doctor shortage, despite the fact that 31 new medical schools have opened since 2002 and many existing ones have increased class sizes, according to Merritt Hawkins, a Dallas-based medical recruiting firm.
It also noted that there are 22 percent more residencies available each year than there are American graduates to take them. Graduates of foreign medical schools now fill that gap; the largest number come from India, followed by Pakistan, China, the Philippines, Iran and Israel.
(Iran is on Mr. Trump’s exclusion list; Pakistan, a Muslim-majority country with a history of internal and external terror attacks, is not.)
Many foreign graduates have J-1 visas, which give them about three years to complete their residencies. “They must pass licensing exams and they must do a residency to practice here, even if they’re superstars where they come from,” said Phillip Miller, a Merritt Hawkins spokesman.
Foreign-born graduates have often worked at world-class institutions and have published academic papers, so they have higher average scores than American graduates on the medical knowledge portions of the licensing examinations, according to Merritt Hawkins research — though most initially score lower on the clinical skills portions, which include English and communication skills.
“I had to work my butt off to get here,” said Dr. Abdelghani el Rafei, a first-year resident at the University of Minnesota. “They only take the top graduates from schools in countries like mine.”
Such foreign-born graduates must return home when their visas expire, but they can get extensions if they agree to work in an area that the Department of Health and Human Services considers “medically underserved,” which is roughly defined as having less than one primary care doctor for every 3,000 people.
Those who practice in an underserved area for several years can apply for green cards. “After that, they can practice anywhere, but at least you’ve had three or four years of a physician in your town, and that’s pretty significant,” Mr. Miller said.
Citing figures from the Iowa Board of Medicine, The Des Moines Register reported last week that 172 doctors practicing in Iowa were from the seven countries subject to Mr. Trump’s travel ban, and that 23 percent of the state’s 13,000 practicing doctors were born outside the United States.
Andrea Clement, a spokeswoman for Medicus, said that 76 percent of the foreign doctors it placed last year had gone to areas with fewer than 25,000 people or to small to medium-size cities of 25,000 to 500,000.
It placed more foreign doctors in Wisconsin than in any other state, she said, followed by California, Texas, Maryland, Oregon, Missouri, Tennessee, Ohio and Arizona.
Some urban areas are medically underserved, too. While Manhattan’s Upper East Side has five times the number of doctors it needs to be adequately served under federal guidelines, parts of the Bronx and Brooklyn have acute doctor shortages.
More than 150,000 residents of Brooklyn’s Bedford-Stuyvesant section, for example, are rated as medically underserved under federal guidelines. One of the doctors stranded overseas last week, according to Pro Publica, was Dr. Kamal Fadlalla, an internal medicine specialist from Sudan who is a second-year resident at Interfaith Medical Center, which serves Bedford-Stuyvesant and Crown Heights.
Many foreign-born doctors, experts said, go into family medicine, pediatrics, internal medicine, general surgery and other front-line specialties where they see thousands of patients a year, including many on Medicare and Medicaid, rather than pursuing lucrative urban specialties like plastic surgery.
As an oncologist, Dr. Parsi was an exception. He moved to the United States in 2007 for postdoctoral work in molecular biology. Then, after passing his medical exam, he completed his residency at the University of Cincinnati and a fellowship in hematology and oncology at the University of Pittsburgh Medical Center.
Because he had to leave the country to get his new visa stamped into his passport, he had flown to Dubai. He cleared a security vetting there, he said, but had to wait a few days for the visa, so he flew to Tehran to see his father.
But the new court ruling affects only those who had current visa stamps in their passport, so even though he is being issued a new visa, he still cannot return to the United States, he said on Saturday.
“Everyone, including me, would like to keep the bad people out,” said Dr. Naeem Moulki, a Syrian citizen who is finishing his medical residency in Minneapolis and plans to begin a cardiology fellowship in Chicago in the fall. “But this is not the best way to do it. If I have to leave, it affects my patients.”
Dr. El Rafei said that the ban, which means he cannot go home to see his family, had depressed him.
“I felt like I was back in Syria again,” he said. “You feel hunted there, as if you did something wrong, even if you didn’t. Now I feel the same way here.”
He sees patients one day a week at the V.A. Hospital in Minneapolis, where he is sometimes asked where he is from.
“One of my patients, he was a veteran in his 60s, said to me, ‘Why do you people hate us?’’’ he said. “I told him about Syria. I said, ‘We don’t hate you. The bad people you see on TV are the same people who make us suffer, too.’”
“I love this country,” he added. “There’s a time in our residency when we can work in Africa or someplace. I want to work in a small American town, to show people that we’re not all bad. The U.S. gives us a lot, so we want to give back what we can.”
https://www.nytimes.com/2017/02/06/health/trump-travel-ban-doctors.html?smid=tw-nytimes&smtyp=cur&_r=0
There really should have been a lot more thought put into this. But, President Bannon wanted to grandstand - so there we are...
cloud4000
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Even conservatives agree Trump's Muslim Ban is a stupid and counterproductive move.
http://www.nationalreview.com/article/444765/travel-ban-incompetent-distraction
nationalreview.com
Travel Ban: Incompetent Distraction from More Important Issues
Stupid but legal. Such is the Trump administration’s travel ban for people from seven Muslim countries. Of course, as with almost everything in American life, what should be a policy or even a moral issue becomes a legal one. The judicial challenge should have been given short shrift, since the presidential grant of authority to exclude the entry of aliens is extremely wide and statutorily clear. The judge who issued the temporary restraining order never even made a case for its illegality.
The Ninth Circuit has indeed ruled against the immigration ban, but even if the ban is ultimately vindicated in the courts (as is likely), that doesn’t change the fact that it makes for lousy policy. It began life as a barstool eruption after the San Bernardino massacre, when Donald Trump proposed a total ban on Muslims entering the country “until our country’s representatives can figure out what the hell is going on.”
Rudy Giuliani says he was tasked with cleaning up this idea. Hence the executive order suspending entry of citizens from the seven countries while the vetting process is reviewed and tightened.
The core idea makes sense. These are failed, essentially ungovernable states (except for Iran) where reliable data are hard to find. But the moratorium was unnecessary and damaging. Its only purpose was to fulfill an ill-considered campaign promise.
It caused enormous disruption without making us any safer. What was the emergency that compelled us to turn away people already in the air with already approved visas for entry to the U.S.?
President Trump said he didn’t want to give any warning. Otherwise, he tweeted, “the ‘bad’ would rush into our country. . . . A lot of bad ‘dudes’ out there!”
Rush? Not a single American has ever been killed in a terror attack in this country by a citizen from the notorious seven. The killers have come from precisely those countries not listed — Egypt, Saudi Arabia, the UAE, Lebanon, Pakistan, and Kyrgyzstan (the Tsarnaev brothers). The notion that we had to act immediately because hordes of jihadists in these seven countries were about to board airplanes to blow up Americans is absurd.
Vetting standards could easily have been revised and tightened without the moratorium and its attendant disruptions, stupidities, random cruelties, and well-deserved bad press.
The moratorium turned into a distillation of the worst aspects of our current airport-security system, which everyone knows to be 95 percent pantomime. The pat-down of the 80-year-old grandmother does nothing to make us safer. Its purpose is to give the illusion of doing something. Similarly, during the brief Trump moratorium, a cavalcade of innocent and indeed sympathetic characters — graduate students, separated family members, returning doctors and scientists — were denied entry. You saw this and said to yourself: We are protecting ourselves from these?
The moratorium turned into a distillation of the worst aspects of our current airport-security system.
If anything, the spectacle served to undermine Trump’s case for extreme vigilance and wariness of foreigners entering the United States. There is already empirical evidence. A November 23 Quinnipiac poll found a six-point majority in favor of “suspending immigration from ‘terror prone’ regions”; a February 7 poll found a six-point majority against. The same poll found a whopping 44-point majority opposed to “suspending all immigration of Syrian refugees to the U.S. indefinitely.”
Then there is the opportunity cost of the whole debacle. It risks alienating the leaders of even nonaffected Muslim countries — the 57-member Organisation of Islamic Cooperation expressed “grave concern” — which may deter us from taking far more real and effective anti-terror measures. The administration was intent on declaring the Muslim Brotherhood a terrorist organization, a concrete measure that would hamper the operations of a global Islamist force. In the current atmosphere, however, that declaration is reportedly being delayed and rethought.
Add to that the costs of the ill-prepared, unvetted, sloppy rollout. Consider the discordant, hostile message sent to loyal law-abiding Muslim Americans by the initial denial of entry to green-card holders. And the ripple effect of the initial denial of entry to those Iraqis who risked everything to help us in our war effort. In future conflicts, this will inevitably weigh upon local Muslims deciding whether to join and help our side. Actions have consequences.
In the end, what was meant to be a piece of promise-keeping, tough-on-terror symbolism has become an oxygen-consuming distraction. This is a young administration with a transformative agenda to enact. At a time when it should be pushing and promoting deregulation, tax reform, and health-care transformation, it has steered itself into a pointless cul-de-sac — where even winning is losing.
— Charles Krauthammer’s e-mail address is letters@charleskrauthammer.com. Copyright (c) 2017, The Washington Post Writers Group
http://www.nationalreview.com/article/444765/travel-ban-incompetent-distraction
nationalreview.com
Travel Ban: Incompetent Distraction from More Important Issues
Stupid but legal. Such is the Trump administration’s travel ban for people from seven Muslim countries. Of course, as with almost everything in American life, what should be a policy or even a moral issue becomes a legal one. The judicial challenge should have been given short shrift, since the presidential grant of authority to exclude the entry of aliens is extremely wide and statutorily clear. The judge who issued the temporary restraining order never even made a case for its illegality.
The Ninth Circuit has indeed ruled against the immigration ban, but even if the ban is ultimately vindicated in the courts (as is likely), that doesn’t change the fact that it makes for lousy policy. It began life as a barstool eruption after the San Bernardino massacre, when Donald Trump proposed a total ban on Muslims entering the country “until our country’s representatives can figure out what the hell is going on.”
Rudy Giuliani says he was tasked with cleaning up this idea. Hence the executive order suspending entry of citizens from the seven countries while the vetting process is reviewed and tightened.
The core idea makes sense. These are failed, essentially ungovernable states (except for Iran) where reliable data are hard to find. But the moratorium was unnecessary and damaging. Its only purpose was to fulfill an ill-considered campaign promise.
It caused enormous disruption without making us any safer. What was the emergency that compelled us to turn away people already in the air with already approved visas for entry to the U.S.?
President Trump said he didn’t want to give any warning. Otherwise, he tweeted, “the ‘bad’ would rush into our country. . . . A lot of bad ‘dudes’ out there!”
Rush? Not a single American has ever been killed in a terror attack in this country by a citizen from the notorious seven. The killers have come from precisely those countries not listed — Egypt, Saudi Arabia, the UAE, Lebanon, Pakistan, and Kyrgyzstan (the Tsarnaev brothers). The notion that we had to act immediately because hordes of jihadists in these seven countries were about to board airplanes to blow up Americans is absurd.
Vetting standards could easily have been revised and tightened without the moratorium and its attendant disruptions, stupidities, random cruelties, and well-deserved bad press.
The moratorium turned into a distillation of the worst aspects of our current airport-security system, which everyone knows to be 95 percent pantomime. The pat-down of the 80-year-old grandmother does nothing to make us safer. Its purpose is to give the illusion of doing something. Similarly, during the brief Trump moratorium, a cavalcade of innocent and indeed sympathetic characters — graduate students, separated family members, returning doctors and scientists — were denied entry. You saw this and said to yourself: We are protecting ourselves from these?
The moratorium turned into a distillation of the worst aspects of our current airport-security system.
If anything, the spectacle served to undermine Trump’s case for extreme vigilance and wariness of foreigners entering the United States. There is already empirical evidence. A November 23 Quinnipiac poll found a six-point majority in favor of “suspending immigration from ‘terror prone’ regions”; a February 7 poll found a six-point majority against. The same poll found a whopping 44-point majority opposed to “suspending all immigration of Syrian refugees to the U.S. indefinitely.”
Then there is the opportunity cost of the whole debacle. It risks alienating the leaders of even nonaffected Muslim countries — the 57-member Organisation of Islamic Cooperation expressed “grave concern” — which may deter us from taking far more real and effective anti-terror measures. The administration was intent on declaring the Muslim Brotherhood a terrorist organization, a concrete measure that would hamper the operations of a global Islamist force. In the current atmosphere, however, that declaration is reportedly being delayed and rethought.
Add to that the costs of the ill-prepared, unvetted, sloppy rollout. Consider the discordant, hostile message sent to loyal law-abiding Muslim Americans by the initial denial of entry to green-card holders. And the ripple effect of the initial denial of entry to those Iraqis who risked everything to help us in our war effort. In future conflicts, this will inevitably weigh upon local Muslims deciding whether to join and help our side. Actions have consequences.
In the end, what was meant to be a piece of promise-keeping, tough-on-terror symbolism has become an oxygen-consuming distraction. This is a young administration with a transformative agenda to enact. At a time when it should be pushing and promoting deregulation, tax reform, and health-care transformation, it has steered itself into a pointless cul-de-sac — where even winning is losing.
— Charles Krauthammer’s e-mail address is letters@charleskrauthammer.com. Copyright (c) 2017, The Washington Post Writers Group
Solomon2
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You might want to keep in mind that the 9th Circuit Has 80 Percent Reversal Rate At the Supreme Court:
http://dailycaller.com/2017/02/09/9...reversal-rate-at-supreme-court/#ixzz4YJWoSSkE
Trump set them up: the Libs are seen as risking national security for political gain. How can they expect not to lose more seats in the 2018 mid-term elections?
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It appears that Mr. Trump and his team need a crash course on civic law.
And yet, they are predicting/dreaming of going to war with Islam and China? They better learn to plan better
Oh the system of checks and balances will give them the lessons they need very quickly, as we can all see.
Yes, but why is the White House now redrafting the order if they are so sure of a win at SCOTUS?
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