Executive Disorder

Surprise: The Trump Administration Wildly Downplayed Impact of Travel Ban

As many as 100,000 visa holders may have been affected.
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Reince Priebus, center, with Mike Pence, left, and Donald Trump, right, at the swearing in of the White House senior staff in the White House, January 22, 2017.By Mandel Ngan/AFP/Getty Images.

In the week since President Donald Trump signed his controversial executive order on immigration, the White House has staunchly defended the action, insisting that reports of chaos and confusion at airports and on Capitol Hill were overblown by the media, and downplayed the impact of the travel ban as a “small price to pay” for security. But during a hearing in a Virginia courtroom on Friday, the Justice Department revealed that more than 100,000 United States visas have been revoked as a result of Trump’s directive.

When asked to quantify the scope of the ban, the Trump team for days has cited the number of individuals detained at U.S. airports since the immigration order went into force. “The fact of the matter is that 325,000 people from foreign countries came into the United States yesterday, and 109 people were detained for further questioning,” White House Chief-of-Staff Reince Priebus said on Sunday during an interview with NBC’s Meet the Press. That figure—109 detainees—was then subsequently tweeted by President Trump and regurgitated on multiple occasions by White House Press Secretary Sean Spicer. “Remember we’re talking about a universe of 109 people,” he emphasized on Monday.

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But the “109” number is only a part of the true figure. As Spicer clarified during Tuesday’s White House press briefing, “The numbers that we’re talking about were the initial group of people that were in transit at the time the executive order was signed.” This means that the figure the White House was peddling to quantify the impact of the executive order represents a very small fraction of the number of individuals actually affected. As The Washington Post notes, it does not include the number of people who were barred from boarding planes at ports of entry abroad or visa holders hit by the executive action.

The same day Trump signed the executive order, the Justice Department provisionally revoked the visas issued to citizens from Iraq, Iran, Libya, Somalia, Sudan, Syria, and Yemen. During a hearing for a lawsuit challenging the immigration order filed in a Virginia court on Friday, an attorney for the Justice Department disclosed that 100,000 individuals had had their visas revoked in the week since the ban was issued. “The number 100,000 really sucked the air out of my lungs,” Simon Sandoval-Moshenberg of the Legal Aid Justice Center, who is representing two brothers from Yemen who were detained at the Dulles Airport in Virginia on Saturday, before being put on a return flight to Ethiopia, said. “I think you could almost hear the collective gasp in the courtroom when the government attorney stated that number that over 100,000 visas have been canceled.”

In a statement to CNN, the State Department disputed the 100,000 figure, telling the outlet that “fewer than 60,000 individuals’ visas were provisionally revoked to comply with the executive order.”

During an interview with ABC’s Powerhouse Podcast on Thursday, Stephen Miller—White House policy adviser and an architect of the executive order, said, “It is hard to envision a smoother rollout from an implementation standpoint,” failing to mention the slew of lawsuits the president has been named in over the order, including those brought in Virginia, Washington, New York, and Massachusetts. He went on to explain that the new administration fears “the next Trojan horse is just waiting to come in,” but stressed, “The reality is that, for virtually the entire country, the only disruption that occurred was the disruption created by protesters.”

There are 60,000 to 100,000 visa holders who might disagree.