WASHINGTON — President Donald Trump signed an executive action Friday that aims to temporarily halt the nation’s refugee program and usher in the most sweeping changes in more than 40 years to how the U.S. welcomes the world’s most vulnerable people.
The White House has yet to release the text of the signed document but a draft obtained earlier showed the measure would block all refugees from entering the U.S. for 120 days and suspend the acceptance of refugees from war-torn Syria indefinitely.
“We want to ensure that we are not letting into our country the very threats that our soldiers are fighting overseas,” Trump said after swearing in new Defense Secretary James Mattis at the Pentagon.
Trump would also block visa applicants entirely from a list of countries with counterterrorism concerns, including Iraq, Iran, Libya, Somalia, Sudan and Yemen, until a new “extreme vetting” procedure for visa applicants could be launched.
The U.S. has admitted more than 3.3 million refugees since 1975, and allowed more than 80,000 refugees in last year alone. Under Trump’s plan, those numbers would plummet to a trickle, except for a narrow group of “religious minorities” that would include Christians fleeing largely Muslim countries.
The action, seen as part of Trump’s campaign pledge to ban Muslims from entering the country, sparked an international outcry, given the historic role that the U.S. and other industrialized nations have long held in embracing victims of war and oppression. The changes would be the most sweeping to U.S. refugee policy since the Vietnamese resettlement programs of the mid-1970s.
In recent months, Trump has backed away from a blanket ban on Muslims and instead said he would focus on blocking people coming from countries linked to terrorism.
What looks like a summary of the order appeared in a news photograph of Trump taken Thursday on Air Force One. It is titled “Executive order to protect the nation from radical Islamic terrorism.”
The first item is to suspend visa issuance to “high-risk countries until ‘extreme vetting’ standards are put in place.” It also calls for a “temporary pause of refugee program,” among other orders.
The Los Angeles Times/Tribune Washington Bureau obtained an eight-page draft of the executive order.
The new vetting procedures would block admission of individuals who engage in “acts of bigotry and hatred,” “place violent religious edicts over American law,” or “would oppress members of one race, one gender, or sexual orientation.”
Trump called the vetting procedures he would put in place “totally extreme” during an interview with Fox News on Thursday. “We’re going to have extreme vetting for people coming into our country and if we think there’s a problem, it’s not going to be so easy for people to come in anymore,” he said.
“I’m going to be the president of a safe country,” Trump told ABC News on Wednesday when asked about the policy. “We have enough problems.”
Trump promised safe zones in Syria to protect vulnerable people, but said that Germany and other European countries had made a “tremendous mistake by allowing these millions of people.” He said residents of countries left out of the ban — Afghanistan, Pakistan, Saudi Arabia — would nonetheless face what he calls “extreme vetting,” and dismissed concerns that his actions would inflame tensions in the Muslim world.
“The world is as angry as it gets,” he said. “What, you think this is going to cause a little more anger?”
Critics called Trump’s order a betrayal of long-held American ideals.
“It is a cruel measure that represents a stark departure from America’s core values,” former Secretary of State Madeleine Albright said Thursday in response to Trump’s plan to curtail refugee resettlement. As a child, Albright fled the communist takeover of then-Czechoslovakia with her family and came to the U.S. as a refugee. She said she benefited personally from the American “tradition of openness” and that “this order would end that tradition, and discriminate against those fleeing a brutal civil war in Syria. It does not represent who we are as a country.”
“We should not be excluding any religion or nationality from the U.S. refugee resettlement program,” said Michelle Brane, a director at the Women’s Refugee Commission.
Traditionally, the U.S. has accepted refugees based on their “vulnerability” and their ties to friends and family in the U.S., Brane said. “Religion and nationality are factors to consider in evaluating the refugee claim, but the program should not exclude a refugee on one of those grounds alone,” she said.
“Donald Trump is retracting the promise of American freedom to an extent we have not seen from a president since Franklin Roosevelt forced Japanese-Americans into internment camps during World War II,” said Steven Goldstein, the executive director of the Anne Frank Center for Mutual Respect in New York City.