June 10, 2025
The primary time Trump did this, we flocked to the airports in protest. This ban isn’t any much less racist—and it could even be extra harmful.
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A demonstrator holds a placard throughout a protest Trump’s newest journey ban at Los Angeles Worldwide Airport on June 9, 2025.
(Patrick T. Fallon / AFP through Getty Pictures)
Final week, President Donald Trump signed a sweeping journey ban barring entry to residents from Afghanistan, Myanmar, Chad, Republic of Congo, Equatorial Guinea, Eritrea, Haiti, Iran, Libya, Somalia, Sudan, and Yemen. Trump was following via on a proclamation he made the day he took workplace for his second time period. It’s an try to demonize Black and Muslim noncitizens as inherently legal and harmful. And if we don’t act, the chief order will additional normalize their mistreatment.
As justification for the ban, Trump proffered that he had thought-about “overseas coverage, nationwide safety, and counterterrorism” targets. Trump additionally tried to tie the chief order to a June 1 assault during which a person is accused of utilizing a makeshift flamethrower and hurling Molotov cocktails at demonstrators demanding the discharge of Israeli hostages. That assault was carried about by an Egyptian citizen—Egypt isn’t on the ban checklist. It’s price noting that no terrorist incident in the US has been perpetrated by a citizen from any of the 12 international locations included within the ban. Different causes, akin to excessive charges of visa overstays from the named international locations, additionally fall brief; many unlisted international locations have far increased charges of overstays.
Regardless of having no rationale that may stand as much as scrutiny, Trump has the facility to do that. In 2018’s Trump v. Hawaii, a five-person majority within the Supreme Courtroom dominated that the president’s first journey ban was “squarely inside his powers underneath the Immigration and Nationality Act.”
In lumping collectively these 12 international locations after which making an attempt to attach them to an assault carried out by a citizen of a separate nation altogether, Trump exemplifies the perspective of the administration and his supporters. This brash and demeaning perspective sees African or Muslim or Center Japanese international locations as indistinguishable of their need, desperation, and potential to hurt Individuals. To try to hyperlink one or one other to concrete causes past obscure and evasive notions is to accord them an excessive amount of consideration and energy altogether.
The reality is that lots of these affected have a lot to supply the US. One affected individual I spoke with simply as information of the ban was launched is a medical skilled from Libya who would have certified for the O-1 or extraordinary skill visa upon finishing his coaching. Now, due to the ban, he must go away the US previous to adjusting standing or having a method of returning. Whereas the state of affairs is crushing for him, additionally it is expensive to the US, which can lose a extremely educated medical skilled who may have saved 1000’s of lives over the span of his profession. In a rustic with an growing old inhabitants like the US, the loss is acute. And there are numerous related tales. Trump’s ban isn’t designed to assist the nation however to fulfill the xenophobia of the MAGA base.
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The ban shall be particularly dangerous for Haiti, the one nation on the checklist within the Western Hemisphere—and, not coincidentally an overwhelmingly Black nation. Haitians received’t be capable of journey to the US for advanced medical care or to flee the gang violence that killed 5,000 individuals final yr.
A lot of the international locations on the travel-ban checklist, together with Haiti, are those Trump referred to as “shithole” international locations in his first time period. On this second time period, he’s added to this view an outline of Africans because the oppressors of white individuals. When South African President Cyril Ramaphosa visited the Oval Workplace lower than a month in the past, Trump blindsided him with accusations {that a} genocide of white farmers is happening in his nation. “Now that is very dangerous, these are burial websites proper there. Burial websites. Over a thousand. Of white farmers,” Trump statedreferring to a video that reveals a highway lined with white crosses with a procession of mourners paying respects.
Trump, after all, was improper. The video Trump was referring to is of a protest that happened after six white farmers had been murdered in South Africa—the crosses didn’t signify particular victims and even the son of the individuals who had been killed affirmed that there was no focused “genocide” in South Africa. These are particulars misplaced on Trump and his MAGA base. A white genocide in Africa is simply too helpful to discard just because it’s made up.
The African nations on the checklist—as Chad’s president, Mahamat Deby Itno, put it—have “no planes to supply, no billions of {dollars} to offer.” These are exactly the explanations the Trump administration selected these international locations: They don’t have the cash or worldwide clout to clap again. Which means Trump can goal them and appease the racist impulses of nativist MAGA adherents with out a lot price. Including Iran and Afghanistan to the combination will additional sate the Islamophobes disillusioned that the Muslim ban from the primary administration needed to be altered.
The bans accomplish one other, much more nefarious Trump administration goal. Having offered a extra certified checklist than the draft checklist of over 40 international locations that the State Division had been reviewing, there may be the insinuation that this motion is proscribed and regarded and thus not so dangerous. This course of is how inhumane and arbitrary acts towards residents of complete international locations are normalized. When Trump imposed journey bans the primary time, individuals rallied at airports and stuffed the streets. However this time, the American public is numb. That is simply one other of a seemingly endless checklist of horrors of draconian immigration enforcement actions. The sheer quantity of wicked and racist actions towards noncitizens might be paralyzing. Not solely do the journey bans and the attendant immigration actions constrain and ban Black and Muslim noncitizens, however additionally they assist make sure that US residents are anesthetized to the brutality round them and perpetrated of their identify.
Rafia Zakaria
Rafia Zakaria is a political thinker, and the writer of The Upstairs Spouse: An Intimate Historical past of Pakistan (Beacon, 2015), Veil (Bloomsbury, 2017), and Towards White Feminism (W.W. Norton, 2021). She not too long ago edited Amidst the Particles: Humanitarianism and the Finish of Liberal Order (Hurst, 2021). She served as a director of Amnesty Worldwide USA from 2009 to 2015.
