Trump's new travel restrictions are nonsensical and cruel

It's not a Muslim ban. It's worse.

A Syrian refugee wipes her eyes at a rally protesting President Trump's travel ban.
(Image credit: JASON REDMOND/AFP/Getty Images)

President Trump's revised travel ban can no longer be fairly characterized as a Muslim ban. But just because it avoids the overt appearance of religious discrimination of the first couple iterations of his ban doesn't mean there's anything remotely rational about it. If anything, it shows that the president isn't really interested in "making America safe again." He mostly wants to settle scores with regimes he doesn't like.

Before the latest changes, Trump wanted to restrict travel from Sudan, Somalia, Syria, Yemen, Libya, and Iran. That ban was set to expire at the end of this month. The revised ban includes all those countries except Sudan, and bizarrely adds Chad, North Korea, and Venezuela. And there is no end date to it.

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Shikha Dalmia

Shikha Dalmia is a visiting fellow at the Mercatus Center at George Mason University studying the rise of populist authoritarianism.  She is a Bloomberg View contributor and a columnist at the Washington Examiner, and she also writes regularly for The New York Times, USA Today, The Wall Street Journal, and numerous other publications. She considers herself to be a progressive libertarian and an agnostic with Buddhist longings and a Sufi soul.