U.S. Travel Ban Is Inhumane and Discriminatory 

Statement from Refugees International:

“The new travel ban on 19 countries announced by President Trump overnight is deeply inhumane and discriminatory. It will disproportionately harm people from countries facing unrest and forced displacement – those who most need access to protection in the United States. 

These designations also reinforce the hypocrisy of the Trump administration’s capricious rollbacks of Temporary Protected Status for people from Haiti, Afghanistan, and Venezuela. When it came to lifting TPS for Afghans, the administration extolled Afghanistan’s tourism sector and ‘notable improvements in security’ – yet this new order bans Afghan nationals on the basis of the Taliban’s terrorist designation under U.S. law. And while the proclamation cites insecurity and government capacity as the rationale for many national bans, in the case of Haiti, it singles out Haitian people as specifically harmful threats to U.S. communities – an astonishingly racist insult to the proud Haitian-American diaspora, and indeed to all Americans.

This new policy is cruel, inconsistent, and nonsensical – and that is indeed the point. This is not a policy that protects America, it is a policy of bigotry masked in legalese.”

For more information or to schedule an interview, please contact Etant Dupain at edupain@refugeesinternational.org.