Trump Travel Ban, Redux

He’s hit 19 countries with travel bans and restrictions as part of his push toward nativist white nationalism.

Screenshot courtesy of Good Morning America

Do you remember where you were and how you felt when Trump announced his first travel ban on several Muslim countries?

That was a bit more than eight years ago, in January of 2017, shortly after Trump took office for the first time. Outraged Americans headed to the airports across the country to protest. And we were justifiably angry. It felt decidedly un-American for the president to single out certain countries and religions for bans, and the people let him know that.

Thankfully, the federal courts initially stopped the ban from going into effect for some time. But eventually, conservatives on the Supreme Court greenlit a version of the ban in 2018. Then a year and a half later, the pandemic shut everything down, and Joe Biden wound up rescinding the whole vile policy in 2021.

Fast forward four years, and we’re back to travel bans. On Wednesday, Trump targeted 12 nations for total exclusion and another 7 for near-total.

But this time around, his announcement barely made headlines. And as Aaron Rupar of Public Notice pointed out, there are no protests in sight, even as the temperature of the water we’re all sitting in begins to spike:

I’m personally unwilling to let the water get any hotter without a single word of condemnation and without pointing out what’s really going on with this newest travel ban.

Divide, demean, distract

I understand that we’re collectively exhausted by Trump’s autocratic orders and racist policies. I realize that this latest travel ban is just one among the many ways Trump uses fear and bigotry daily to divide us. And we can be forgiven if we aren’t rushing to the airports in defense of travelers from foreign lands while our own courts, neighborhoods and communities are being raided by militarized ICE agents in facial coverings.

It’s a different, more dystopian world than it was eight years ago, and it will likely get worse. Perhaps much worse.

The White House didn’t say the racist part aloud with its order, but it doesn’t have to. Everyone already understands that all of the nations targeted are poor, and that all the travelers who are banned are either brown or black skinned.

Trump once referred to some of these nations as “shithole” countries, and he hasn’t changed his disrespectful, demeaning tone. He’s also clearly hoping that his base of MAGA voters will devour the red meat of this action, accustomed as they are now to the politics of nativist resentment, while remaining ignorant what he and the GOP are preparing to inflict upon them.

As Senator Chris Murphy (D-CT) noted yesterday, maybe if people are scared enough, and Trump acts tough enough, MAGA will forget he’s stripping away their Medicaid and handing their money to the ultrawealthy:

“The actual agenda is to steal from regular Americans in order to pad the pockets of the rich…. So how do you get that done? You distract people by making them think they’re at war with other Americans, making them think that they have something to fear from people who look different from them or speak a different language. This is what demagogues have done all throughout time… to divide us from each other, make us feel like we need to be fighting ourselves, while on the side, they’re stealing from us.”

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Bogus bases

Trump had prepared the travel ban earlier and has had it in his back pocket for some time. He decided to issue it, he claims, in response to the the terror attack on Jews in Boulder, who were gathered to bring attention to the plight of Hamas-held hostages.

“The recent terror attack in Boulder, Colo., has underscored the extreme dangers posed to our country by the entry of foreign nationals who are not properly vetted, as well as those who come here as temporary visitors and overstay their visas,” Trump declared in a video message that announced the ban. And then in a clear message to his base he added, “We don’t want them.”

We versus them.

The Boulder attacker was an Egyptian man who overstayed his visa, and Trump and the right made significant political hay with this fact. But if the travel ban is supposed to target potential terrorists—the order’s title mentions “foreign terrorists and national security threats” after all—you’d think Trump would start with the countries that have allowed terrorists into this country, such as Saudi Arabia, Qatar and Egypt.

Yet somehow Egypt, which reportedly paid Trump a secret $10 million bribe in 2016, was not among the banned nations.

Attacking communities that supported him

There is a sad irony in the exclusion of tourist travelers and students from nations such as Cuba and Venezuela. Many Cuban and Venezuelan voters supported Trump in 2024, believing that he would focus his deportation efforts on actual criminals and not simply target anyone who was undocumented.

That proved to be untrue. Then Trump took it a big step further by rescinding the Temporary Protective Status of hundreds of thousands of migrants from these countries, as well as others, meaning all of these people who entered legally and at the invitation of the Biden White House were suddenly deportable.

Now Trump has made it nearly impossible for members of these communities to have their families and relatives even visit them here.

A silver lining to this horrific series of events is that Trump’s approval rating among Latinos is cratering as stories of abuses and gestapo tactics by ICE spread. Among independent Latino voters, who had swung heavily for Trump in the election, the drop is particularly steep. As Politico reported yesterday, “Among independents, Trump’s approval dropped from 43 percent in February to 29 percent in May.”

Another poll, conducted by Equis Research, found that among Latino voters who backed Biden in 2020 but switched to Trump in 2024, 64 percent said Trump has gone too far on mass deportation.

Notably, these numbers are from polls taken before the travel ban was announced and before inflation and shortages hit in more serious ways, as is expected later this summer if the tariffs on our trading partners remain high.

Nudging us toward white nationalist rule

It is notable that the White House’s “rollout” of the new travel ban avoids many of the pitfalls and errors of the original Muslim travel ban. The administration cites a “neutral” standard of “percentage of overstayed visas” as grounds for selecting the countries on the banned list. And it allowed a few days for the ban to go into effect so as not to see a repeat of the chaos of 2017, when people arriving on planes from the banned countries were suddenly stranded and unable to enter the U.S.

The new travel ban likely will pass muster with the courts as well, given the ruling of the Supreme Court in 2018, though there may still be efforts to stop it. But what may be legal for the administration to impose does not make it morally correct or aligned with our core values of pluralism and diversity—principles that are under direct attack by the right at every level of our government and in all aspects of our society.

The travel ban sends a clear message that black and brown people, even ordinary tourists and students, are suspect and unwelcome here. “America First” doesn’t just mean putting U.S. priorities ahead of international ones. It means keeping America white and free of the menace that is “poisoning” our blood.

The combined imagery of ICE deporting darker skinned migrants and the CBP forbidding anyone from Trump’s “shithole” countries from entering the U.S. is no doubt a Stephen Miller special. But we aren’t powerless against it.

While we may not be able to change what the government does as official policy, we can resist its efforts, stand up for our neighbors, and speak out against white nationalist and nativist policies and actions. Each of us has a part to play here, whether it’s supporting DEI in our workplaces and in our public facing statements, demanding our congressional representatives hold the Department of Homeland Security accountable, or getting into good trouble when the federal authorities show up, as we’ve now seen communities from San Diego to Minneapolis do.

Travel bans make us weaker as a country because they badly tarnish our global reputation and governments singled out by us are less willing to cooperate on many levels, including security. They also make us weaker because we become divided from within, with many now asking damaging questions such as who really belongs here and who does not. America should be a promise open to all.

History repeatedly demonstrates that anti-immigrant and nativist movements arise and then ultimately dissipate as the riled up populace realizes that all of the hate and fear mongering did nothing to make their lives any better. Division and discord are not sustainable for any nation over the long term.

We are well along this same path today, and I believe MAGA Trumpism will ultimately meet the same fate as other discredited movements. How long that takes to happen, and how many people will have to suffer, is left to us as a society to determine.