On Jan. 27, President Donald Trump signed an executive order that temporarily bans anyone traveling to the United States with passports from Libya, Iran, Iraq, Somalia, Sudan, Syria and Yemen. He also suspended America’s refugee system for 120 days. Several judicial challenges have already stymied this order.
Many people describe Trump’s order as a “Muslim ban” because the seven countries banned are predominantly Muslim.
Trump, among other top-level Republicans, continues to claim his order isn’t a ban on a particular religion.
“This is not a religious test, and it is not a ban on people of any religion,” an aide for House Speaker Paul Ryan said.
Yes, it is.
The thinly-veiled order by Trump clearly intends to discriminate on the basis of faith in a particular religion — Islam. It shouldn’t be a surprise to anyone who has been paying attention. This has been Trump’s intention all along.
“Islam hates us,” Trump said during an interview last year on CNN.
This was a dangerous statement from Trump as a presidential candidate, and it’s worse now that he has the full force of the United States government behind him. When Muslims from all over the world hear this kind of divisive language from the leader of the free world, it becomes antithetical to who we are as a people and as a country.
The hundreds of thousands of people who rushed to the streets and the courts to fight this order understand this is not who we are. Citizens, lawyers and elected officials from every state rushed to restore the basic promise that America was built on for the people who were stranded in airports across the country because of the ban.
The University’s faculty and students who protested the discriminatory executive order in last week’s walk out in the Quad understand this too.
James Robart, a Bush-appointed federal judge from Seattle, issued a nationwide restraining order blocking the ban the president instated last week, and there are more legal challenges being filed across the country.
We shouldn’t ban or discriminate against people because they look and pray differently than we do. The First Amendment makes this clear: “Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof. ”
This executive order isn’t what we should expect from the United States of America. Are we going to begin turning our backs and isolating ourselves under the guise of “America first?”
I understand where Trump is coming from, but he’s wrong. Virtually everyone understands America is a nation of immigrants. Our very foundation was built on the backs of non-native people. This is who we are and who we’ve always been.
If Trump wishes to construct this country’s future, he should be more mindful of its past.
Frederick Bell is a 19-year-old mass communication sophomore from Greensburg, Louisiana.