Establishment media have maligned President Trump for his executive order restricting travel from countries that foment terrorism, mislabeling it a “Muslim ban,” and Joe Biden has vowed to reverse it on “day one,” should he occupy the Oval Office.
But critics of the order, insisting it was motivated by animus for Muslims, have never addressed the issue it actually was designed to address, writes Todd Bensman, a senior national security fellow for the Center for Immigration Studies, in an analysis for the Investigative Project on Terror.
“If Biden repeals the ban, how would the United States ensure applicants from pre-modern countries where violent Islamic terrorist organizations operate would be kept out of the country?” Bensman writes.
“To date, neither the campaign nor the fledgling transition team has acknowledged the problem that Trump’s travel ban ostensibly addressed, defaulting mainly to assertions that its only real purpose was to satisfy an anti-Muslim animus,” he said. “Whatever the motive, America’s inability to detect malevolent travelers will become problematic again after travel from the countries is restored.”
In January, Trump added six nations to the list: Burma, Eritrea, Kyrgyzstan, Nigeria, Sudan and Tanzania. Restrictions, which were upheld by the Supreme Court, remained in place on travel from Iran, Libya, North Korea, Somalia, Syria, Venezuela and Yemen.
Bensman, also a former manager of counterterrorism for the Texas Department of Public Safety’s Intelligence & Counterterrorism Division, cited three threats that developed before Trump’s travel order that could have had disastrous consequences.
Mustafa Alowemer, 17, was allowed by “refugee-friendly” Obama State Department officials to travel to the U.S. in 2016.
Within three years of his arrival, he was under federal indictment for plotting to bomb a church in north Pittsburgh attended by Nigerian Christians.
Apparently, his objective was to inspire other ISIS supporters in the United States to commit similar acts. It turned out he was “already a full-fledged ISIS acolyte before applying for his refugee slip to the United States.”
In another incident, 20-something married couple Mohamed Abdirahman Osman and Zeinab Abdirahman Mohamad were granted permission under the Obama administration to resettle from Somalia to Tucson, Arizona.
Shortly after arriving, they were charged by federal prosecutors with 11 counts of repeatedly lying on their refugee applications and subsequent permanent residency applications.
“Just about everything they said was a lie, the indictment alleges, including their real names and nationalities, their claim that al-Shabaab had kidnapped the couple and held them hostage, and that Mohamed Osman lost his hands in a terrorist attack,” Bensman wrote.
They eventually were deported instead of facing trial.
Third was the case of Gaafar Muhammed Ebrahim Al-Wazer, who arrived in the U.S. from Yemen in 2014. Two years later, the FBI learned, via a tip, Al-Wazer had fought with the Iranian-backed Shiite Houthis, who held virulently anti-American views.
On his Facebook page, Al-Wazer wished “death to all Americans, especially Jews,” and vowed he would stay on the path of jihad, Bensman said.
“These cases and others should serve as reminders to incoming policy-makers that what Trump often notoriously called ‘extreme vetting’ should remain a national priority,” he said.
The greatest value of Trump’s travel ban, Bensman wrote, was that “it eliminated the high-stakes gamble that America’s security vetting systems could suss out terrorist actors from countries with such governance problems.”
“Perhaps its greatest weakness, arguably, was that it did not include enough countries with records-keeping deficiencies or diplomatic hostility.”
Under a Biden administration, however, “losses” will be “a more certain outcome.”
