Trump’s travel bans and extreme vetting: how they violate basic human rights [Blog post]

One of Donald Trump’s first actions as president of the United States was to issue an Executive Order banning the citizens of seven Muslim majority countries, Iran, Iraq, Libya, Somalia, Sudan, Syria and Yemen from entering the United States for a period of 90 days. He justified the ban on the grounds that it would be detrimental to the United States if citizens of those states were permitted to enter the country while a review was being conducted of the existing screening and vetting procedures utilized to determine whether a person should be issued an entry visa. The implementation of the ban was halted by the issuance of temporary restraining orders by multiple federal district courts, and on 9 February, the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals refused to stay enforcement of those temporary restraining orders. Unperturbed, President Trump issued a second executive order on 6 March in which he sought to ban citizens from six of the seven countries identified in the first ban (having removed Iraq from the original list) from entering the United States. That executive order was also challenged in Court, and federal district courts in Hawai’i and Maryland again prevented its implementation through the issuance of restraining orders. While much of the attention given to the travel bans focuses on the discriminatory effects they have on Muslims from certain countries, considerably less consideration has been given to the types of screening and vetting procedures the administration wishes to impose and the potential effects these new measures would have on the rights of all travelers to the United States. This blog post will demonstrate that policies requiring foreign travelers to reveal private electronic data are impermissible under United States’ domestic law and international law and should be avoided.