New Yorkers and elected officials denounced President Trump’s travel ban impacting 12 African and Asian countries, which took effect Monday.
Critics of the president’s order gathered in Foley Square on June 9 decried the move as yet another example of government overreach on Trump’s part that undermines traditional American values.
The travel ban prevents people from Afghanistan, Myanmar, Chad, Congo-Brazzaville, Equatorial Guinea, Eritrea, Haiti, Iran, Libya, Somalia, Sudan, and Yemen from entering the United States. However, there are exemptions for lawful permanent residents, existing visa holders, immediate family immigrant visas, diplomatic visas, and certain other visa categories, such as adoptions or dual nationals with passports from unrestricted countries.
In proclaiming the travel ban, Trump claimed that the affected countries regularly declined to accept the return of their own nationals and/or had deficient screening or vetting processes, according to Reuters.
As Brooklyn City Council Member Alexa Aviles sees it, however, the ban constitutes another “racial policy against New Yorkers and American citizens” attacking the fundamental values of the country.
“We will continue to fight for” American values, Aviles said. “We need everyone to say that this is not okay, that this is deplorable, that this goes against everything we stand for.”
Hussein Yadavary, the executive director of the Muslim Community Network, said Trump’s ban is “a racist, fear-driven policy targeted at 19 Black and Brown nations under the false guise of national security.”
“This is not the America and the United States that we know,” Yadavary said. “This is supposed to be a nation of the rule of law, and this administration continues to trample on the U.S. Constitution.”
Public Advocate Jumaane Williams spoke about the ban in the context of recent US Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) raids around the country and at 26 Federal Plaza in Lower Manhattan, where agents are apprehending undocumented individuals who showed up for scheduled hearings.
“You can look at your TV and say, ‘Well, they were only aliens anyway. they were only criminals anyway.’ But it’s not,” Williams said. “It is students. It is working families. It is mothers they’re being ripped from the children, not for having committed a crime, not even for being here illegally. They’re being lied to now to come down to federal court, thinking something else is going to happen because they’re following the pathway legally.”
Jean-Claude Pierre of the Haitian Bridge Alliance said that his group and others would work to stop the travel ban and other anti-immigrant policies from the second Trump administration just as hard as it did during Trump’s first term in 2017-18, when he enacted a Muslim travel ban and policies separating families as the southern border with Mexico.
“We want the government that has created this policy to terrorize and traumatize to stop trying to destroy the community,” Pierre said. “What are we doing now, when people have been kidnapped in the very courtrooms that are supposed to protect them? What are we doing now, Americ? What are we doing now, when our families cannot continue?”
With Reuters reporting
