In leaked documents, the case for Trump’s Muslim ban takes another huge hit

We keep hearing that United States President Donald Trump will roll out a new version of his travel ban any day now. The White House delayed it last week because Trump advisers reportedly thought it could step on the good press he’d earned from his speech, thus inadvertently undercutting their own claims that enacting the ban is an urgent national security matter.

Here’s the real reason for the delay: The Trump administration can’t solve the problem that has always bedevilled this policy, which is that there isn’t any credible national security rationale for it. Unlike on the campaign trail, when you’re governing, you actually have to have justification for what you’re proposing, or you often run into trouble.

MSNBC’s Rachel Maddow had an important scoop on Thursday night that further undercuts the substantive case for Trump’s ban, which would restrict entry into the country by refugees and migrants from select Muslim-majority countries. Maddow obtained a new internal Department of Homeland Security [DHS] document that reached this key judgement: We assess that most foreign-born, US-based violent extremists likely radicalised several years after their entry to the United States, limiting the ability of screening and vetting officials to prevent their entry because of national security concerns.”

This new document is separate from another DHS document that was leaked to the press week before last. That one also undercut the case for the ban, concluding that “country of citizenship is unlikely to be a reliable indicator of potential terrorist activity.”

The new document obtained by Maddow weakens the central rationale for the ban, which is to put a temporary delay on entry into the US for the express purpose of tightening up America’s vetting procedures. DHS’s conclusion appears to be that vetting procedures in particular are not that useful in screening out people who radicalise later, and that most foreign-born emigrants to the US who become violent extremists, fall into that category. “There’s nothing they can set up at the border to tell you years down the road who might become ... a radical and violent person years from now,” Maddow observed.

This complements the conclusion of the other leaked memo. Taken together, they appear to mean that DHS’s analysts believe that singling out those countries makes little sense and that the problem in preventing terrorism by immigrants does not lie in America’s vetting procedures as they are, which already screen out the immediate threats.

Now, an important caveat is necessary here — one that sheds more light on the Trump administration’s actual rationale for the ban, which is crying out for more debate. The ban’s main architects — Stephen K. Bannon and Stephen Miller — would probably argue that these new documents don’t undercut their larger arguments for it.

As I have reported, the evidence is mounting that Bannon and Miller view the ban as part of a much broader, long-term demographic-reshaping project. Miller let slip in a recent interview that the ban isn’t just about national security, but also about protecting US workers from foreign competition. And the Los Angeles Times reports that Bannon and Miller have privately argued that the ban is in keeping with the need to combat immigration by people who “will not assimilate”: Inside the West Wing, the two men have pushed an ominous view of refugee and immigration flows, telling other policymakers that if large numbers of Muslims are allowed to enter the US, parts of American cities will begin to replicate marginalised immigrant neighbourhoods in France, Germany and Belgium that have been home to plotters of terrorist attacks in recent years, according to a White House aide familiar with the discussions.

Thus, the ban is of a piece with the long-term goals of protecting American workers from economic competition and preventing European-style immigrant communities (which incubate terror plotters) from developing in the US. Bannon and Miller could argue that these arguments are partly about national security, too. But this is a case that centres on long-term demographics. That does not support the administration’s case for the immediate ban, since DHS has concluded that “extreme vetting” can’t screen out the threat of radicalisation later. If anything, those larger motives undermine the case for the ban, by throwing its stated short-term motive into doubt.

It’s time for the Trump administration to kill the ban — the case for it is collapsing — and forthrightly debate this larger argument.

— Washington Post

Greg Sargent writes The Plum Line blog.