President Donald Trump signed an executive order Friday that bans all refugees from entering the country for up to four months, with Syrian refugees receiving an indefinite ban. Trump claims this indefinite ban on Syrian refugees is to keep out “radical Islamic terrorists.”
In addition to the ban, Trump has called for a religious test to separate Muslims from Christians coming from majority-Muslim countries.
As of Friday night, Muslim refugees from the Middle East and Africa were already being grounded and detained.
The Council on American-Islamic Relations will be filing a federal lawsuit to challenge the ban. According to a CAIR press release sent out on Saturday, “The lawsuit, to be filed in the U.S. District Court — Eastern District of Virginia, will challenge the constitutionality of the order because its apparent purpose and underlying motive is to ban people of the Islamic faith from Muslim-majority countries from entering the United States.”
“The courts must do what President Trump will not — ensure that our government refrains from segregating people based on their faith,” said Attorney Gadeir Abbas, Esq., who is co-counsel on the lawsuit.
In a New York Times op-ed, David J. Bier, an international policy analyst at the Cato Institute wrote, “Mr. Trump appears to want to reinstate a new type of Asiatic Barred Zone by executive order, but there is just one problem: The Immigration and Nationality Act of 1965 banned all discrimination against immigrants on the basis of national origin, replacing the old prejudicial system and giving each country an equal shot at the quotas.”
It remains to be seen whether Trump’s latest executive order will stick.