Playing to the most bigoted part of his base
Trump 2024: Bring Back the ‘Muslim Ban’ — and Expand It
If he wins again, Trump wants to bring back one of the most vile parts of his first stint in office
BY ASAWIN SUEBSAENG, ADAM RAWNSLEY
DONALD TRUMP FOR months has been telling people close to him that he plans to bring back his infamous
“Muslim ban” if he’s reelected in 2024, according to two sources with direct knowledge of the matter.
“Gotta bring it back,” Trump has said of the policy, according to the two sources, who added he regularly calls the idea “beautiful.”
Banning Muslims from entering the United States is a longstanding obsession of Trump’s. In December 2015, during the GOP presidential primary, he called for a “total and complete shutdown of Muslims entering the United States.” He took a step toward that vision just a few days after taking office, when he signed an executive order banning the entry of citizens from Iran, Libya, Somalia, Sudan, Syria, Yemen, and Iraq for 90 days.
The ban caused chaos and confusion at U.S. airports and ports of entry, and led to a diplomatic fallout with Iraq, where the U.S. still had thousands of troops deployed. Federal courts blocked the initial order, but in 2018 the Supreme Court narrowly approved a subsequent revision of the ban — which included the addition of largely non-Muslim countries such as North Korea and Venezuela to the list of countries subject to tighter restrictions. President Joe Biden reversed the executive order in one of his first executive orders after taking office.
But the former president appears to be unsatisfied with merely reinstating the ban as it existed during his presidency. More recently, Trump has privately discussed adding more countries, including Afghanistan, to the list of majority-Muslim countries whose citizens he’s seeking to ban from the United States.
The hints of Trump’s interest in a reinvigorated travel ban are noticeable in his recent speeches, although they haven’t received much public scrutiny.
“I will restore my travel ban to keep radical Islamic terrorists out of our country,” Trump said in a late-April appearance in New Hampshire. “We were very tough on that. We don’t want our buildings blown up. We don’t want to have problems.”
“My wonderful travel ban, it was so wonderful,” he lamented during a March appearance at the Conservative Political Action Conference as he promised mass deportations if reelected.
The ban was not wonderful.
“It’s honestly kind of pathetic that this is his idea of the sort of success he wants to replicate. There are literally no grounds on which any of the three versions of the travel ban were successes by anyone’s definition — they were incoherent policy messes that also ruined countless families’ lives,” argues Dara Lind, a senior fellow at the American
Immigration Council. “The legal immigration system is still struggling to get back on its feet after 2017-2020 (partly because of Covid but also because it’s really hard to keep a functioning policy system when policy keeps changing on a dime). This sure wouldn’t help. And if the theory here is that he’s going to be able to get the courts in 2025 to sign on to something the courts in 2017 wouldn’t … well, I sure hope
he’s wrong.”
Trump has also touted other hardline anti-immigration policies while campaigning. On Wednesday, he appeared in a
video message to supporters to blast the expiration of Title 42, a Covid-era emergency provision which allowed the U.S. to ....
If he wins again, Trump wants to bring back one of the most vile parts of his first stint in office
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