Former President Trump said Friday for the first time publicly during the 2024 presidential campaign that he would bring back a travel ban “even bigger than before,” alluding to his administration’s restrictions on travelers from heavily Muslim countries.
The first two bans faced steep challenges in court, but the third version of the ban was upheld by the Supreme Court in a 5-4 decision in 2018. That ban barred nearly all travelers from five mainly Muslim countries, in addition to North Korea and Venezuela. President Biden signed an executive order reversing the ban his first week in office.
Under the Trump administration, we imposed extreme vetting and put on a powerful travel ban to keep radical Islamic terrorists and jihadists out of our country,” Trump told his audience. “Well, how did that work out? We had no problem, right? They knew they couldn’t come here if they had that moniker. They couldn’t come here.”
“When I return to office, the travel ban is coming back even bigger than before and much stronger than before. We don’t want people blowing up our shopping centers. We don’t want people blowing up our cities and we don’t want people stealing our farms. So it’s not gonna happen.”
And that’s not all, when he says bigger and stronger this is what he’s really talking about:
Donald Trump has announced a new campaign proposal on United States immigration — barring “communists” and “Marxists” from entering the country.
The Republican former president, who is making another bid in 2024, on Saturday said he would use “Section 212 (f) of the Immigration and Nationality Act” to “order my government to deny entry to all communists and all Marxists.”
“Those who come to enjoy our country must love our country,” Trump said during a speech at the Faith and Freedom Coalition’s conference in Washington, adding, “We’re going to keep foreign, Christian-hating communists, Marxists and socialists out of America.”
He also said there needs to be a “new law” to address communists and Marxists who grew up in America, but didn’t elaborate on what it would include.
I’m sure a Republican congress (including a GOP Senate that has jettisoned the filibuster) will be happy to help with that. And he’s got some very good friends in the judiciary who owe him their lifetime sinecures.
He sure is making America great again, isn’t he?