Washington: Two days into President Donald Trump’s new ban on refugees, migrants and foreign nationals from seven countries, there was still mass confusion about the details.
On Sunday evening, the White House organised a briefing for reporters with two senior administration officials who agreed to explain the president’s executive order — but only on the condition anonymity.
One senior administration official explained the ground rules to reporters gathered at the White House and listening on a conference call, then said: “With that, I’ll turn it over to a senior administration official.”
“Thank you,” the other senior administration official said before beginning a 45-minute defence.
Their overarching message: Everything is going exactly according to plan, nothing has changed since the order was signed, and the news media need to calm down their “false, misleading, inaccurate, hyperventilating” coverage of the “fractional, marginal, minuscule percentage” of international travellers who have been simply “set aside for further questioning” for a couple hours on their way into the greatest country in the world.
“It really is a massive success story in terms of implementation on every single level,” the administration official said at one point.
The administration official said the order was drafted with help from “several of the top immigration staff on Capitol Hill,” then was approved by the Justice Department’s Office of Legal Counsel and reviewed by some government agencies. The White House purposely implemented the ban with no warning because “everybody here can use their imaginations to imagine 25 reasons that wouldn’t make sense from a security standpoint, a management standpoint, from just an airport-safety standpoint, you name it,” the senior administration official said. (The other senior administration official jumped in at one point to make clear that the order “isn’t willy-nilly.”)
There had been some confusion about how legal permanent residents — also known as green-card holders — would be treated under this new order. On Saturday, this same senior administration official told reporters that if a green-card holder from one of the seven targeted countries is currently elsewhere in the world, that person would need to apply for a case-by-case waiver before returning to the United States. But then on Sunday morning, the president’s chief of staff went onto a morning news show and said that the executive order “doesn’t affect them.”
“Nothing has changed,” the senior administration official explained, claiming that the White House has provided clear instructions from the beginning on how green-card holders should navigate the system. These green-card holders are “exempt” from the new restrictions, the senior administration official said.
A reporter jumped in: “That’s different from what you said when we were in here yesterday, right?”
“No,” the senior administration official said.
“Do you want me to pull the quote?” the reporter said.
“You can do whatever you want,” the official said.
The official then explained that green-card holders are exempt because they can apply for and receive a waiver. As of Sunday afternoon, 170 legal permanent residents had applied for waivers to avoid the new restrictions and all 170 had been granted those waivers.
“Some of the confusion stemming from the green-card issue is just semantic in nature,” the senior administration official said. “I think some of the confusion stems from the semantic debate about the meaning of the word ‘exemption.’ Again, internally, we’ve been clear on this from the beginning, and we’ve waived people through.”
Plus, the senior administration official said, the number of people who have to deal with these new restrictions is “a fractional, marginal, minuscule percentage” of the approximately 325,000 residents of other countries who arrive in the United States each day. During the first 24 hours that the executive order was in place, 109 people were “set aside for further questioning,” a situation that many others would describe as being detained by authorities.
“In terms of the operation of the executive order, at the implementation level, it has been done seamlessly and with extraordinary professionalism,” the senior administration official said at one point, later adding that these changes have been implemented with “minimal disruption for other travellers.”
A reporter asked the senior administration official to respond to Senator Bob Corker, the chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, and said on Sunday: “We all share a desire to protect the American people, but this executive order has been poorly implemented, especially with respect to green card holders.”
The senior administration official said the senator presumably misunderstands the order.
“He might have read one of CNN’s stories,” the senior administration official said. “And, for that, the only responsible party would be CNN.”
After another jargon-filled explanation of how everything is working the way it should, the senior administration official noted that “processes for travel are always evolving” and that “travel is proceeding as it should for those who should be travelling.”
“The important thing to keep in mind is that the United States runs the largest immigration system in the world,” the senior administration official said. “We have about 80 million people, give or take a few million, that enter the United States through an air, land or seaport in a given year. The complexity and scope and reach of the immigration system is beyond imagination and, then again, there’s sort of a strange irony — I don’t know if irony is the right word — but there’s something immensely disproportionate about people protesting that this year 79,999,900 or whatever will be processed through instead of the 80 million. I mean, you’re talking about letting in more people than the size of almost every country on earth every single year.”
