President Joe Biden signed an executive order on Wednesday repealing the Trump government’s travel bans that restricted visitors from predominantly Muslim and African countries.
Biden’s executive order – fulfilling a campaign promise to end former President Donald Trump’s travel bans on the first day of his administration – instructs the State Department to restart visa processing for people in countries like Libya, Iran, Somalia, Syria, Yemen, Venezuela, and Nigeria.
Trump’s first travel ban, which took effect on January 27, 2017, created chaos and confusion around the world. Lawyers and protesters went to US airports in an effort to help trapped travelers who were caught by the ban and faced deportation. The ban would continue to keep families separated for years and refugees outside the country.
Harsha Panduranga, a lawyer for the Brennan Center’s Freedom and National Security Program, said it was a very important first step for the Biden government.
“This is a really big deal,” Panduranga told BuzzFeed News. “Thousands of people have been separated from their loved ones, and Biden has done a good job of openly rejecting politics as a racially and religiously prejudiced ban.”
Panduranga urged the new government to act as quickly as possible in creating a clear guide to reverse travel bans.
Zahra Billoo, executive director of the office of the Council on American-Islamic Relations in the San Francisco Bay Area, said that Biden’s executive order corrects the course of so many troubled lives in the United States and abroad. The Biden government also sends the message that immigrants’ anti-Muslim policies will not be tolerated, added Billoo.
“Tens of thousands of affected individuals will now have a chance to be with their families during difficult and important times,” said Billoo in a statement. “Although we know that our work is far from over, today we celebrate the heroic efforts undertaken by so many in recent years in our effort to lift Muslim and African prohibitions.”
Undoing the “damage” caused by travel bans, as the Biden government said, will require more than just reversing Trump’s executive actions and resuming visa processing. Biden’s executive order also instructs the United States government to develop a plan within 45 days to address the cases of people who were arrested in the exemption process, which granted exceptions for those who needed visas and would otherwise have qualified to get it.
Biden’s executive order also asks the Secretary of State to develop a proposal so that people who have been denied visas because of Trump’s ban can have their requests reconsidered. The plan should consider reopening immigrant visa applications that were denied because of two of Trump’s travel bans and whether it is necessary to charge an additional fee to process them, the executive order states.
A 2019 analysis by the Cato Institute, a libertarian think tank based in DC, found that the travel ban kept about 15,000 spouses and adopted children of separate American citizens.
The first ban and a subsequent version were legally challenged and overturned by lower courts, but the Supreme Court maintained a third iteration in 2018. Travel restrictions were later expanded to include six countries, four of them in Africa.
People from 13 countries ended up facing travel restrictions, including Libya, Iran, Somalia, Syria, Yemen, North Korea, Venezuela, Nigeria, Kyrgyzstan, Myanmar, Eritrea, Sudan and Tanzania.
One of the Supreme Court’s justifications for maintaining Trump’s ban was that its presidential proclamation included an exemption program, which provided exceptions. The Bridge Initiative, a research project carried out at Georgetown University that focuses on anti-Muslim sentiment, found that 74% of visa exemptions were refused between December 2017 and April 2020 for all countries affected by the prohibitions.
Opponents of the Trump ban said it discriminates against Muslims. In 2015, his campaign released a statement calling for a “total and complete stoppage of Muslims” to enter the United States until the country “could find out what’s going on.”
Aarti Kohli, executive director of Asian Americans Advancing Justice – Asian Law Caucus, said Biden’s repeal of Trump’s travel bans represented a victory for his communities and the people who opposed them.
“Four years ago, we saw people of all races and religions come together to advocate against the prohibitions, which separated families and took lives,” Kohli said in a statement. “As we celebrate the outcome of the arduous struggle, we will continue to put pressure on the government Biden to take bold action, repair the damage of the past four years and do justice to our immigrant communities. “