How Trump's immigration decree took effect

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Last week, the US Supreme Court presented Donald Trump with a victory by repealing a ban on lower-level federal courts enforcing a presidential decree suspending entry into the US from Libya, Syria, Iran, Somalia, Sudan, and Yemen.

About how he was accepted, says Vladimir Kozlovsky for the service Air force.

The decree is designed for 90 days, during which the administration must develop ways to more thoroughly check visitors from six countries that it considers problematic.

A parallel ban on the entry of refugees is generally designed for 120 days, but to date, the annual quota for receiving refugees has almost been fulfilled: out of 50 thousand, less than a thousand people are left to accept.

Under Barack Obama, the quota for receiving refugees was 100 thousand people, but in January, Trump cut it in half.

The decree came into effect on Thursday, 20 hours, New York time. In the fourth terminal of the Kennedy airport, a powerful handful of activists and liberal lawyers prepared to help the citizens of these six countries, which are deployed under passport control, took up the position in advance.

Activists and lawyers held posters and sang songs.

But the mountain gave birth to a mouse: now there was no hint of chaos that reigned at US international airports in January, when the new government made the first attempt to enforce Trump’s decree.

The initial decree was drafted, poorly thought out, and began to be implemented without preparation. Some air travelers found out about it already on board the aircraft or right at the border.

The decree made no exceptions even for holders of a green card, a document granting the right to permanent residence in the United States. Among the hundreds of foreigners who were not allowed into the country or subjected to lengthy interrogation, there were, for example, several Iraqis who collaborated with the US military.

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At the airports of the east coast of America, heart-rending scenes were played out, which caused outrage among television news viewers. However, this did not last long, since the liberal federal judges began one by one to block the presidential decree, and the appeals instances supported them.

According to the law, the executive branch of the United States has every right not to let in a country of foreigners, if there is reason to believe that they could pose a potential threat to national security. But at the same time, the constitution prohibits discrimination based on religion.

Although the Muslims were not directly mentioned in the decree, critics of the president quoted quotes from Trump's pre-election speeches and his tweets in which he promised to close the entrance to Muslims. The liberal judges found this argument convincing and in turn rejected the decree.

Instead of immediately appealing to the Supreme Court, the White House rewrote the decree, but the new text was also rejected by the courts.

“Both ours and yours”

The administration finally began to seek understanding from the highest court in the United States - and now it has found it: the Supreme Court unanimously overturned the ban on the implementation of the presidential decree, without even mentioning the arguments of critics about its anti-Muslim nature.

The victory of the White House was, however, only partial.

Photo: facebook / The White House

First, the Supreme Court made a reservation that it will make a final decision on the decree only in October, when its new session will begin.

Secondly, he made an exception for individuals who have demonstrable links with individuals or legal entities in the United States. This is a family connection or a document of admission to an American university or company.

Three conservative members of the court - Samuel Alito, Clarence Thomas and Neil Gorsuch, who was already appointed by Trump - advocated for approval of the order without the mentioned exception.

Thomas, the only African-American on the Supreme Court, warned that this would lead to an avalanche of lawsuits over whether the foreigner has the sought-after ties to the United States. But six members of the court voted in favor of the exception.

As the famous New York lawyer Barry Ivan Slotnick, who was then defending Vyacheslav Ivankov, nicknamed Yaponchik, explained to me 20 years ago, American courts tend to make decisions on the principle of “both ours and yours.” Perhaps the Supreme Court was now guided by the same rule, making an exception for foreigners from six problem countries who have close relatives in the United States.

The question of who exactly belongs to this category, at first caused bewilderment. The State Department quickly clarified that it includes parents (including adoptive), children, siblings, sons-in-law and daughters-in-law, but not cousins, grandparents.

«An army of thousands of lawyers«

“Separating families based on these criteria is simply heartless,” said Naureen Shah of the international human rights organization Amnesty International.

This time, the authorities were well prepared for the decree to come into force. The main thing is that decisions about admission to the United States are now made not at passport control at American airports, but at consulates abroad. Therefore, the lawyers who came to the fourth terminal of the main New York airport to meet flights from London, Doha, Istanbul and Abu Dhabi wasted their time.

According to the representative Amnesty International Jasmith Sidhu, this human rights organization has no information that after the restoration of the decree at least one person was detained at US airports.

“We have an army of thousands of lawyers who are ready to return to Kennedy Airport if necessary,” warned Camille Makler of the New York Immigration Coalition.

A few minutes after the Supreme Court decision, the state of Hawaii asked a local federal judge to interpret the vague wording of this document.

Supporters of the temporary ban prove that in the six countries to which it applies, there is often no stable central government and competent local authorities, therefore the State Department has no one to check the authenticity of the documents and biographical data of their citizens applying for a US visa.

It is not clear, however, whether it is possible to solve this problem within three months.

Opponents of the decree also say that there were no terrorist attacks or attempts to commit them in the United States, which could have been prevented by the Trampian decree, even if it had existed for a long time.

The Washington Post published a list of the 24 most notorious terrorist attacks and attempted attacks in the United States - from plans to bomb public transport, for which two Yemeni citizens were arrested in August 1997 in New York, to the bombings at the finish line of the Boston Marathon, carried out by the Tsarnaev brothers.

The current decree could theoretically prevent the terrorist attack at Ohio State University in November last year, where the attacker crashed into a crowd of people in a car, and then began to beat them with a knife. The attacker was from Somalia, and two years before he had immigrated to Pakistan.

In March 2006, a similar crime was committed at the University of North Carolina by a native of Iran, but he arrived in the United States at the age of two.

Critics of the decree say that he not only discriminates Muslims, but is also useless.

His supporters are reminded of the recent terrorist attacks in Europe and say that God protects the cherished.

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