Trump's Muslim Ban: A Social and Political History

The health effects of restrictive immigration and refugee policies targeting individuals from Muslim-majority countries are largely unknown. To analyze whether President Trump's 2017 executive order 13769, "Protecting the Nation from Foreign Terrorist Entry into the United States" (known as the "Muslim ban" executive order) was associated with changes in health care utilization by people born in targeted nations living in the US. This retrospective cohort study included adult patients treated at Minneapolis-St. Paul HealthPartners primary care clinics or emergency departments (EDs) between January 1, 2016, and December 31, 2017. Patients were categorized as (1) born in Muslim ban-targeted nations, (2) born in Muslim-majority nations not listed in the executive order, or (3) non-Latinx and born in the US. Data were analyzed from October 1, 2019, to May 12, 2021. Executive order 13769, "Protecting the Nation from Foreign Terrorist Entry into the United States." Primary outcomes included the number of (1) primary care clinic visits, (2) missed primary care appointments, (3) primary care stress-responsive diagnoses, (4) ED visits, and (5) ED stress-responsive diagnoses. Visit trends were evaluated before and after the Muslim ban issuance using linear regression, and differences between the study groups after the executive order issuance were evaluated using difference-in-difference analyses. A total of 252 594 patients were included in the analysis: 5667 in group 1 (3367 women [59.4%]; 5233 Black individuals [92.3%]), 1254 in group 2 (627 women [50%]; 391 White individuals [31.2%]), and 245 673 in group 3 (133 882 women [54.5%]; 203 342 White individuals [82.8%]). Group 1 was predominantly born in Somalia (5231 of 5667 [92.3%]) and insured by Medicare or Medicaid (4428 [78.1%]). Before the Muslim ban, primary care visits and stress-responsive diagnoses were increasing for individuals from Muslim-majority nations (groups 1 and 2). In the year after the ban, there were approximately 101 additional missed primary care appointments among people from Muslim-majority countries not named in the ban (point estimate [SE], 6.73 [2.90]; P = .02) and approximately 232 additional ED visits by individuals from Muslim ban-targeted nations (point estimate [SE], 3.41 [1.53]; P = .03). Results of this cohort study suggest that after issuance of the Muslim ban executive order, missed primary care appointments and ED visits increased among people from Muslim-majority countries living in Minneapolis-St. Paul.

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A week after his presidency began in 2017, Donald Trump passed an Executive Order travel ban which became more widely known as the Muslim Ban[1]. The Travel Ban is an executive order that prohibits seven Muslim-majority countries from entering into the United States. The Executive order was a policy delivered on the back of Trump’s Campaign trail rhetoric, being based on religious biasness, and racial and discriminatory migration policies that targeted refugees and immigrants. Three of the Muslim states listed in the ban are in Africa: Somalia, Libya and Sudan. The ban had immense impacts on Muslim communities by separating families and refugees depicted as a security threat.[2] As a result of this policy and accompanied negative political rhetoric, refugees have been left feeling marginalised and discriminated against.
 
 [1] Ayoub, A. and Beydoun, K. (2016), ‘Executive disorder: The Muslim Ban, emergency advocacy, and the fires next time,’ Michigan Journal of Race and Law, 22, p.215
 [2] Ibid

Background: On January 27, 2017, President Trump issued Executive Order (EO) 13769, “Protecting the Nation from Foreign Terrorist Entry into the United States,” which suspended the U.S. Refugee Resettlement program and prevented citizens from seven Muslim-majority countries (Iraq, Syria, Iran, Libya, Somalia, Sudan, and Yemen) from traveling or immigrating to the U.S. The impact of EO 13769 on healthcare utilization among people from EO-targeted nations is unknown. Methods: We conducted a retrospective review of primary care and emergency department (ED) visits to HealthPartners clinics and hospitals in Minneapolis-St. Paul, Minnesota, home to the largest Somali Muslim community in the U.S. We compared visit counts, missed appointments, and visits for stress-responsive diagnoses before and after EO issuance among three groups: 1) adults born in EO-targeted nations, 2) adults born in Muslim-majority nations not listed in the EO, and 3) U.S.-born non-Latinx adults. We evaluated visit trends using linear regression and differences between groups using difference-in-difference analyses. Findings: From 2016 to 2017, 252,594 patients were included in the analysis: 5,667 (2.2%) in Group 1, 1,254 (0.5%) in Group 2, and 245,673 (97.3%) in Group 3. In early 2016, primary care visits and stress-responsive diagnoses dramatically increased for individuals from Muslim majority nations (Groups 1 and 2). Following EO 13769 issuance, there was no change in missed clinic appointments and an increase in ED visits among individuals from EO-targeted nations, particularly in the first 30- to 60-days after issuance. Interpretation: Increases in clinic utilization among people born in Muslim majority countries before EO 13769 issuance and subsequent increased ED utilization by people from EO-targeted nations likely reflect elevated cumulative stress due to an increasingly hostile climate toward Muslims in the U.S., rather than one specific policy change. Funding Statement: This study was not supported by any funding source. Declaration of Interests: The authors have no conflicts of interest to disclose. Dr. Gonsalves is supported by the National Institutes of Health National Institute on Drug Abuse (1DP2DA049282-01 and 2 R37 DA15612-16) and the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases (5R01AI042006-23). Dr. Padela receives grant support from the US Department of Health and Human Services Health Resources and Services Administration, the Greenwall Making a Difference Program, and Patient Centered Outcomes Research Institute. Dr. Samuels is supported by an Advance Clinical and Translational Research (Advance-CTR U54GM115677) Mentored Research Award. Ethics Approval Statement: This study was approved by the HealthPartners and Yale Institutional Review Boards.

On January 27, 2017, President Donald Trump signed an executive order (EO) banning citizens of seven Muslim countries—Iran, Iraq, Libya, Somalia, Sudan, Syria, and Yemen—from entering the United States. In addition, the EO suspended the already anemic refugee program for ninety days and banned Syrian refugees indefinitely. Chaos ensued as two hundred inbound travelers with valid visas, green card holders, and dual citizens were detained in US ports of entry. Some unfortunate few were deported, while others remained in limbo as the American Civil Liberties Union and other organizations contested the constitutionality of the ban before Judge Ann M. Donnelly of Federal District Court in Brooklyn. Donnelly subsequently ordered that the detained travelers not be deported. Another US District Court judge, James Robart of Washington State, halted the ban altogether on February 3, 2017.At the heart of what later came be known as the "Muslim ban" is an attempt to vilify Muslim bodies, ban their mobility, and invade their privacy by activating the invading, terrorist other narrative. Trump's ascendancy to the presidency was the culmination of a fearmongering rhetoric that pitted disenfranchised white Americans against minorities and immigrants of numerous ethnicities or faiths (Mexicans, Arabs, South Asians, and Muslims). It portrayed a dismal picture of a vulnerable America in crisis—one whose borders are constantly penetrated by immigrant invaders looking to steal American jobs and inflict harm on unsuspecting civilians. The old Cold War rhetoric has been reactivated, only this time the Soviet/Russian enemy is supplanted by the Muslim enemy. The "invading" Muslim bodies have to be invaded in return, disrobed, prodded, questioned, and forced to leak information pertaining to matters of faith and its practice. Some travelers report being asked if they pray regularly and to what extent they subscribe to shariʿa law. Others were ordered to surrender their smartphone passwords, subsequently being detained further if any Quranic verses appeared in their chats or Facebook posts. To be admitted into any US port of entry, Muslim bodies have to submit to various forms of physical and digital inspection, X-rays, and questions violating their privacy to the point of eliminating their dignity and essence. They have to be transparent, self-erasing to the point of nonexistence. Only then can their perceived threat be neutralized.This Muslim hunt did not stop at citizens of the seven countries referenced in the EO but extended to American citizens of all ethnicities. There are reports of twenty-five American citizens who were stopped at the border, asked about the relevance of their names to the Muslim faith, and ordered to surrender their smartphones and passwords. On February 7, 2017, Muhammad Ali Jr., the son of the late boxer Muhammad Ali, and his mother, Khalilah Camacho-Ali, were detained at Fort Lauderdale–Hollywood International airport (Vales 2017). Camacho-Ali was released upon showing her picture with her late ex-husband. However, Muhammad Ali Jr. was detained for another two hours and asked whether he was a Muslim, and what was the reasoning behind his unabashedly Muslim name, Muhammad, despite his African American ethnicity. On March 9, 2017, he was prevented yet again from boarding a flight, this time in Washington, DC, because of his name.The most pernicious aspect of profiling and targeting the Muslim citizens of the seven nations in the EO travel ban is the way that it normalized prejudice and gave license to hateful rhetoric and violent extremists. On February 22, 2017, two Indian engineers were shot at a bar in Olathe, Kansas, by Adam Purinton, who hurled racial slurs and shouted, "Get out of my country!" (Eligon, Blinder, and Najar 2017). The subsequent death of thirty-two-year-old Srinivas Kuchibhotla and the deafening silence of the Trump administration in condemning this hate crime speak volumes to the challenges minorities and immigrants face in the era of Trump. The unseen benefit of this unprecedented attack on our constitutional and civil liberties is the mobilization of US citizens from various backgrounds against prejudice and tyranny. Uniting in collaborative resistance, residents of New York organized an "I Am a Muslim Too" rally on February 19, 2007. Thousands of people filled Times Square in protest of the Muslim ban, declaring that an attack on one Muslim American is an attack on all Americans. Non-Muslim women donned the hijab as they listened to Linda Sarsour, the former executive director of the Arab American Association of New York and cofounder of MPower Change. Invoking their shared humanity, she stated, "While you are saying, 'I am Muslim too,' I say to you, 'I am unapologetically Muslim all day, every day.'" (Chow 2017). The focus on resisting through an intersectional coalition that brings men, women, and members of various ethnic and religious communities together is key to defying the encroachment on American civil liberties. Indivisible movements sprouting all over the country are the best forms of civil and feminist advocacy in defiance of Trump's Muslim ban. Akin to the millions of Arabs who protested tyrannical autocrats by occupying public squares during the Arab Spring, American citizens invading city squares and congressional offices represent the antidote to Trump's poisonous, divisive rhetoric, and the triumph of American democracy.

From the moment President Donald Trump signed it into effect, the Muslim ban would become the focus of outrage. Thousands gathered at airports across the country to protest the executive order. Lawyers filed challenges. Universities and CEOs issued public condemnations. Earlier that same week, the President signed another executive order, calling for the creation of a massive deportation force which, within a few months, rounded up hundreds of thousand of undocumented immigrants, terrorizing millions more. Another executive order halved the number of refugees annually admitted to the country and cancelled the protected status previously extended to displaced Haitians and Central Americans. Those orders generated far less outrage, few protests, no corporate press releases. Why does the Muslim ban seem to betray “everything we stand for,” as Dick Cheney announced, while the other orders are received with relative complacence? This essay attempts to answer that question by tracing a set of shifts in the rhetorical norms and legal architecture governing immigration law and policy over the past century. The controversial enactment of the Muslim ban is particularly resonant with failed attempts to pass a “Hindu” ban, almost exactly one hundred years before. Constrained by a shift in global norms governing racial discourse, Congress hoping to exclude Indian immigrants from the United States eventually succeeded in passing a law to exclude “Hindus” not “by name” but through the invention of a geographic designation, the “Asiatic Barred Zone.” In the post-colonial era, the exclusion of immigrants on the basis of racial identity is no longer tolerable, but the exclusion of immigrants on the basis of nationality or place of origin has become entirely normative—as the Supreme Court’s decision upholding the Muslim ban demonstrates.

On January 27, 2017, one week into his presidency, Donald Trump enacted Executive Order No. 13769, popularly known as the “Muslim Ban.” The Order named seven Muslim-majority nations and restricted, effective immediately, the reentry into the United States of visa and green card holders from these states. With the Muslim Ban, President Trump delivered on a central campaign promise, and as a result, injected Islamophobia into American immigration law and policy. The Muslim Ban had an immediate impact on tens of thousands of Muslims, directly affecting U.S. visa and green card holders currently outside of the country, while exacerbating fear and hysteria among immigrant and citizen Muslim populations within the country. This Essay memorializes the advocacy taken by the authors in the immediate wake of the Muslim Ban, highlighting the emergency legal and grassroots work done by the authors during a moment of national disorder and disarray, and within Muslim American communities, mass confusion and fear. This Essay highlights efforts, coalition building, and the necessary resources that contributed to the effective defense and education of impacted Muslim populations. It further examines the heightened vulnerabilities of and compounded injuries to often-overlooked Muslims at the intersection of race and poverty, as a consequence of Islamophobic policies such as the Muslim Ban.

In the attention given to Trump's Muslim ban, overlooked by many critics was the fact that two of Trump's executive orders creating the ban invoked the idea of killings. The term killings appeared in the Purpose section and the Transparency and Data Collection section of the first executive order. It also appears in the Transparency and Data Collection section of the second executive order, a section that has not been superseded by subsequent executive actions. In this article I examine the role of killings in these executive orders, in litigation against the Muslim ban, and in judicial responses to the ban. I also sketch a genealogy of how killings became a problem for U.S. governance, through the efforts of Ayaan Hirsi Ali's AHA Foundation and the linking of Muslim immigrants with terrorism, gender subordination and threat to sexual liberty made visible in Trump's presidential campaign speeches. In Trump's executive orders, rhetoric and data work together to create the vision of killings as a problem in the United States. The use of the phrase killings in the executive orders can be understood as evincing a professed concern for violence against women, while actually functioning to reinforce a perception of Muslim barbarity and inferiority. The invocation of killings thus functions as the kind of coded signal called a dog whistle. This cynical deployment of feminist concerns as a proxy for xenophobic exclusion is troubling enough. But what may be even more disturbing is that the notion that killings are a problem in the United States has been constructed through false and misleading claims about data. As explained in the article, the idea that there are 23 - 27 honor killings occurring annually in the United States was circulated by former Attorney General Jeff Sessions when he was a Senator, and is expressed in the report produced by the Departments of Justice and Homeland Security in response to the current Transparency and Data Collection mandate of the second executive order. This number is invented and invalid. This submerged story about the contribution of killings to the Muslim ban has been largely missed. But the part played by very specific ideas about gender in creating anti-Muslim animus deserves a central place in our scrutiny. The specter of violence against women has played an important role in the Trump administration's executive orders seeking to bar Muslims from entry, and continues to rationalize the notion that the nation must be protected through their exclusion.

The Muslim Ban and preterm birth: Analysis of U.S. vital statistics data from 2009 to 2018.

In all the attention given to Trump's Muslim ban, the invocation of “honor killings” in two of the executive orders creating the ban was largely overlooked. This chapter examines how both rhetoric and false and misleading data were used to produce the idea that honor killings are a problem in the United States. After examining how “honor killings” functioned in the executive orders, in litigation against the Muslim ban, and in judicial responses to the ban, the chapter traces a genealogy of how “honor killings” became an issue for US governance via the linking of Muslim immigrants with terrorism, gender subordination, and threat to sexual liberty. While the invocation of “honor killings” in the executive orders could seem to evince a professed concern for gendered violence, the term functions as a “dog whistle” suggesting barbarity and inferiority, and rationalizes the notion that the nation must be protected through Muslim exclusion.

PurposeThe purpose of this article is to provide non‐law librarians with two strategies for quickly helping millennials with online US Supreme Court research. The first strategy is to locate law‐librarian authored online research guides on the topic. The second strategy is to jump straight into one of the many free online databases that contain US Supreme Court opinions.Design/methodology/approachThe article demonstrates the abundance of academic law‐librarian authored legal research guides available on the internet and explains how to evaluate them. Additionally, the article provides examples of many free online databases that allow searching, browsing and retrieval of full‐text US Supreme Court opinions.FindingsMillennials looking for US Supreme Court opinions expect to be provided with digital research resources. Online legal research guides can help librarians find the latest online databases with full‐text US Supreme Court opinions. Widespread internet access to the entire run of US Supreme Court opinions is a very recent phenomenon. But today, several new web sites have made the entire run of US Supreme Court opinions available for free, vastly improving librarians' ability to meet millennials' expectations of immediate access to full‐text resources online.Originality/valueThis article provides librarians with two strategies for quickly helping millennials with online US Supreme Court research.

Execution: an unwanted side-effect

Unequal reproductive justice under the law

The Trump administration was notorious against refugees in general and refugees from Muslim countries in specific. While the European Union was subject to a refugee crisis at the time due to Arabs fleeing to the European borders in high numbers, Trump wanted to avoid a refugee crisis in the US at any cost, including violating International Refugee treaties and the US Constitution. In this article, we evaluate Trump administration’s policies and executive orders regarding refugees in light of two International Refugee treaties, namely: The Convention against Torture and other Cruel Inhumane or Degrading Treatment (“UNCAT”) and the 1951 Refugee Convention and its 1967 Protocol. Furthermore, this article scrutinizes the Trump administration’s foreign policies that were intentionally aiming at undermining refugees’ protections under International Refugee treaties by defunding a vital Refugee organization such as the United Nations Relief and Works Agency for Palestine Refugees in the Near East (“UNRWA”). Moreover, we argue that Trump did not only breach International Refugee treaties, but also the First Amendment of the US Constitution and two notable US Supreme Court doctrines: The Charming Betsy and the Chevron doctrines. In addition, this article evaluates Biden’s recently adopted executive orders and policies concerning refugees whose purpose was to reverse Trump’s international and constitutional law breaches. Finally, this article offers a constructive criticism of Biden administration’s newly adopted refuge policies, proposing viable legal solutions to the US-refugee dilemma.

The US Supreme Court and Affirmative Action: The Negative Impact on the Physician Workforce