Trump deflects migrant ban chaos by blaming Delta, protesters

DEMONSTRATORS HOLD signs and march towards Federal Plaza protesting U.S. President Donald Trump's executive order blocking visitors from seven predominantly Muslim nations in New York on Sunday, Jan. 29. Court decisions temporarily blocked the U.S. administration from enforcing parts of Trump's order after a day in which students, refugees and dual citizens were stuck overseas or detained and some businesses warned employees from those countries not to risk leaving the United States. / BLOOMBERG NEWS PHOTO/JEENAH MOON
DEMONSTRATORS HOLD signs and march towards Federal Plaza protesting U.S. President Donald Trump's executive order blocking visitors from seven predominantly Muslim nations in New York on Sunday, Jan. 29. Court decisions temporarily blocked the U.S. administration from enforcing parts of Trump's order after a day in which students, refugees and dual citizens were stuck overseas or detained and some businesses warned employees from those countries not to risk leaving the United States. / BLOOMBERG NEWS PHOTO/JEENAH MOON

(Updated 9:47 a.m.)
WASHINGTON – President Donald Trump defended the immigration clampdown that sparked a global backlash over the weekend by blaming the confusion at airports on protesters and on a computer outage at Delta Air Lines Inc. that caused flight cancellations.

“Only 109 people out of 325,000 were detained and held for questioning. Big problems at airports were caused by Delta computer outage” and “protesters,” Trump said in a series of Twitter messages Monday. Homeland Security Secretary John Kelly “said that all is going well with very few problems.”

The University of Massachusetts at Dartmouth released a statement on Saturday after two faculty members were detained by U.S. Customs and Border Control officers at Logan International Airport in Boston upon their return from an academic conference in Paris.
The statement, from Peyton R. Helm, interim chancellor, and Mohammad Karim, provost, said both professors are legal permanent U.S. residents and have green cards. They said that after three hours of detention, they were released.

“Now that our colleagues are safe, we want to be clear that we believe the executive order does nothing to make our country safer and represents a shameful ignorance of and indifference to the values that have traditionally made America a beacon of liberty and hope,” they wrote.

- Advertisement -

Trump was defending an executive order issued two days earlier that sets new barriers to entry for people from seven mostly Islamic countries. Refugees, visa holders and permanent U.S. residents were all among those affected, at least initially. But White House aides sought to minimize the impact of the order Monday after allies from the U.K. to Germany condemned the move and major international companies said it threatened to strangle the free flow of workers and commerce.

The computer interruption at Delta didn’t begin until about 7 p.m. New York time on Sunday, more than 48 hours after Trump signed the executive order. While it grounded about 170 flights, it lasted less than three hours and didn’t affect international flights.

Trump compared his order to one issued by his predecessor, Barack Obama, and effectively told fellow Republicans who criticized him to mind their own business.

“This is not about religion — this is about terror and keeping our country safe,” Trump said in a statement Sunday pushing back against the international uproar that followed his action. “There are over 40 different countries worldwide that are majority Muslim that are not affected by this order.”

Figuring it out

The fallout from the order was swift, compounded by the fact that few — including some of Trump’s own aides — seemed clear what was in it. Two of his top aides, strategist Steve Bannon and son-in-law Jared Kushner, had to get on the phone with British officials to walk them through it. Another Trump aide said the order added a new step to re-entry for some green-card holders. Yet another aide said the status of such permanent legal residents would be clarified later.

Late in the day Sunday, Kelly issued a statement declaring that the entry of green-card holders is in the national interest. He said such individuals would be allowed into the country barring any significant evidence that they pose “a serious threat to public safety and welfare.”

Trump adviser Kellyanne Conway said on CNBC Monday that there was a campaign of “misinformation” about the order.

‘Most generous country’

“We are the most generous country in the world when it comes to our immigration policies but you have to go stand in line and you can’t be, at least for the next 90 days, a foreign national or a citizen of seven countries,” Conway said.

One Trump friend and adviser, Tom Barrack, said the president has indicated that the immigration order serves two purposes: one, to keep a potential terrorist out, but two to send a signal to the larger Middle East that the countries there need to take control of the situation at home and stop using a flood of refugees as a bargaining chip to pressure the West.

Given that Trump’s foreign policy team is only now taking shape, “it is just a way to push back with the only tool that he has, so he is giving a time-out while his team gets in place and then they will have a run at it,” Barrack said in an interview.

Trump views the order as the first step of what he has described as a “Marshall plan” for the Middle East, where he will help countries with U.S. support in hopes of improving lives and putting as many as 60 million young people to work on electricity and other infrastructure projects, Barrack said. Trump made calls on Sunday to two U.S. allies in the region — Saudi Arabia’s King Salman and Abu Dhabi’s Crown Prince Sheikh Mohamed bin Zayed.

Read about Trump’s calls to Arab allies to boost anti-terrorism efforts.

Courts jump in

Amid the confusion over Trump’s order, the courts went into the breach, with no fewer than three federal judges seeking to block parts of it temporarily. The judges intended to prevent people stopped from entering the country from being sent back home, and to let most of those who were stopped enter the U.S. But they did little to clarify the state of the law going forward. White House officials insisted the rulings were moot because the travelers were processed as provided under the law.

Read about a judge’s ruling that may help tech workers bypass the order.

Adding to the legal drama is the possibility that Trump could name his choice to fill a vacancy on the Supreme Court as early as Monday, setting the constitutionality of this order as a backdrop to what is sure to be a brutal confirmation battle with Democrats who joined the outcry against Trump’s move.

The human drama played out at airports across America, Europe and the Middle East, as officials struggled to interpret instructions that appeared to catch much of the U.S. government by surprise.

At the same time, the potential implications began to set in for multinational companies. After an early outburst of anger by some American technology leaders — Apple’s Tim Cook, Facebook’s Mark Zuckerberg, Tesla’s Elon Musk — chief executive officers of other industries from finance to autos started to grapple with the order’s reach.

Jeff Immelt, General Electric Co.’s chairman and CEO, wrote in an internal e-mail that GE has “many employees from the named countries” who are “critical to our success and they are our friends and partners.” GE, he said, would “continue to make our voice heard with the new administration.”

Google, Microsoft

Silicon Valley executives were more outspoken. Google CEO Sundar Pichai, an immigrant from India, called the policy “painful” and Microsoft Corp.’s Satya Nadella took to the company’s LinkedIn to highlight “the positive impact that immigration has on our company, for the country, for the world.”

Friday’s executive order suspended the admission of all refugees for 120 days and imposed a 90-day entry freeze for citizens of seven countries, from U.S. ally Iraq to longstanding enemy Iran.

The confusion around the order was exemplified by the debate over its effect on holders of green cards. At least 60 were stopped from entering Saturday at one airport alone, Dulles International outside Washington.

Trump chief of staff Reince Priebus initially said the green card holders wouldn’t be denied entry. “If you’re coming in and out of one of those seven countries,” Priebus said on NBC’s “Meet the Press,” “then you’re going to be subjected, temporarily, with more questioning until a better program is put in place over the next several months.”

Americans first

Through it all, the White House insisted the program’s implementation was running smoothly and affected only about 109 people on a day when 350,000 travelers entered the U.S. White House Press Secretary Sean Spicer said Trump was merely putting Americans first. “The safety of our country has got to be paramount,” he said on ABC’s “This Week.”

But two Republican senators, John McCain and Lindsey Graham, warned that the measure may not succeed even on those grounds. They said it risked spurring anti-American sentiment and turning into a “self-inflicted wound in the fight against terrorism,” questioning whether all the relevant government departments had been properly consulted.

The two also said they were “concerned by reports that this order went into effect with little to no consultation with the Departments of State, Defense, Justice, and Homeland Security.”

“We all share a desire to protect the American people, but this executive order has been poorly implemented, especially with respect to green card holders,” Senator Bob Corker, chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, said in a statement. “The administration should immediately make appropriate revisions, and it is my hope that following a thorough review and implementation of security enhancements that many of these programs will be improved and reinstated.”

Sudan reaction

Unsure of the rules, officials at airports everywhere played it safe. In Amsterdam and London, all U.S.-bound travelers from the seven countries — the others are Syria, Sudan, Somalia, Yemen and Libya — were being turned away.

Sudan’s foreign minister, Ibrahim Ghandour, said the ban comes as the two countries started to work more closely to combat terrorism, and only two weeks after Obama lifted decades-old sanctions on the North African country.

“We feel sorry that the decision was taken at a time we started cooperating and the sanctions were lifted,” Ghandour said in an interview in the Ethiopian capital, Addis Ababa, where he’s attending an African Union summit. We’ll wait “until the executive decision passes and see what is next after that and then we’ll act accordingly.”

The leaders of key American allies distanced themselves from Trump.

Canada’s Prime Minister Justin Trudeau said his country would welcome those fleeing persecution, “regardless of your faith.” German Chancellor Angela Merkel, who spoke to Trump on Saturday, expressed her concern that the fight against terrorism “doesn’t justify placing people of a particular origin or faith under general suspicion,” according to her chief spokesman Steffen Seibert. “We do not agree with this kind of approach,” U.K. Prime Minister Theresa May said of the immigration freeze on Sunday, two days after meeting with Trump in Washington.

In the U.K., an online petition calling for Trump’s upcoming state visit to be canceled had a million signatures — 10 times the number needed to trigger an almost-automatic debate in Parliament. Still, there’s no vote at the end of it and lawmakers don’t have the power to force May’s hand.

Countries including the U.K., Germany and Canada have been deeply enmeshed for decades in U.S.-led security and economic systems. Trump has thrown them into question.

He’s threatened to withhold military assistance from NATO allies who don’t pay their share of defense costs, and rip up trade accords that he says were rigged against U.S. interests. The immigration row comes just a few days after Trump’s plan to build a border wall sparked a fight with his Mexican counterpart, who canceled a trip to Washington.

No posts to display