On Inauguration Day 2025, President Donald Trump began signing a rack of executive orders establishing the highest, more pressing policy priorities of his young second administration, immigration and border security topping the list with 10 initial orders. Most of the executive orders attracted much media attention and analysis. But one of the most interesting and consequential of the orders attracted little to no attention, the action-packed one reestablishing a bigger, expanded so-called “Muslim travel ban,” an enforcement program that will seek to deport foreign visa-holders who demonstrated for Hamas on college campuses, and an ambitious, labor intensive national security vetting program that will almost certainly slow the flow of all U.S. visas.
Decoding Trump’s Border Counterterrorism Order, Part 1
Pro-Hamas, anti-Jewish college demonstrators here on visas are on notice that their U.S. welcome is over, even with expected lawsuits
Decoding Trump’s Border Counterterrorism Order, Part 2
A Center for Immigration Studies database of national security vetting failures offers Trump 2.0 a big head start on the executive order to fix broken processes
Decoding Trump’s Border Counterterrorism Order, Part 3
Watch for the return of a bigger, improved misnamed “Muslim Travel Ban”
The Stories
Decoding Trump’s Border Counterterrorism Order, Part 1
Pro-Hamas, anti-Jewish college demonstrators here on visas are on notice that their U.S. welcome is over, even with expected lawsuits
By Todd Bensman as published on January 27, 2025 by the Center for Immigration Studies
One of the many executive orders (EOs) flowing from President Donald Trump’s pen portends a dramatic slow-down or blockage of U.S. entries for many millions of foreign nationals seeking visas. This EO, “Protecting the United States From Foreign Terrorists and Other National Security and Public Safety Threats”, has largely slipped media interest and analysis, despite the fact that it brings back Trump 1.0’s “extreme vetting” for broad ranges of visa applicants until or unless American authorities can ensure, through rigorous security vetting, that they won’t likely pose a terrorism or public safety threat.
But that lack of coverage won’t last, because the EO seems to encompass one unnoticed visa category: the potentially thousands of foreign college students on F-1 visas believed to have demonstrated on behalf of the U.S.-designated terrorist organization Hamas and for the group to commit genocide against Israel. The EO would also seem to cover F-1 visa applicants still abroad deemed inclined to join them.
Although the EO doesn’t explicitly identify these demonstrators for targeting, its language surely allows for the Trump administration to open a front that would, barring expected litigation, eventually seek visa revocations and deportations of foreign students who can be identified as participating. We might presume this is what the EO is referencing, because this was a promise candidate Trump often issued from the campaign stump.
This EO directs U.S. homeland security workers to make sure going forward that rigorous national security vetting for terrorism proclivities or terrorism involvements happens “to the maximum degree possible” before foreign nationals receive a visa or an “immigration benefit of any kind”.
Adjudicators are directed to pay special attention to “those aliens coming from regions or nations with identified security risks”, a likely reference to Muslim-majority nations where anti-U.S. designated Islamist terrorist groups like Hamas are active. The EO starts to scope in on the demonstrators from there.
Next, the EO language expands the definition of screen-worthy threats far beyond any visa applicant still abroad who only might commit acts of terrorism after arriving in the United States.
“And the United States must ensure that admitted aliens and aliens otherwise already present in the United States do not bear hostile attitudes toward its citizens, culture, government, institutions, or founding principles, and do not advocate for, aid, or support designated foreign terrorists and other threats to our national security.” (Emphasis added.) Other language elsewhere reinforces Trump administration abhorrence that Jewish U.S. citizen opponents of the pro-Hamas demonstrators experienced violent suppression of their free speech rights, and says that the U.S. government will take “any actions necessary” to protect such American citizens from those who provide “advocacy, or support for foreign terrorists”.
New Elements in the National Security Screening Mandate
“Bearing hostile attitudes” toward founding principles and American culture and “advocacy for designated foreign terrorists” are new to national security vetting policy and may or may not legally qualify as a legitimate violation to revoke a student visa or other kind of immigration status.
But the language foreshadows clear intent: government programs to identify and expel the demonstrators who are here on visas. Litigation and public controversy are sure to follow.
The language shows up in the context that candidate Trump and congressional Republicans frequently called for the deportations of such foreign national demonstrators in the U.S. who showcased their hostile attitude toward the United States and advocated for Hamas. Some of them might hold student F-1 student visas, while other participants may have other visas.
“When I am president, we will not allow our colleges to be taken over by violent radicals,” Trump told a rally in New Jersey last May. “If you come here from another country and try to bring jihadism or anti-Americanism or antisemitism to our campuses, we will immediately deport you.”
In its platform unveiled at its July 2024 convention, the Republican Party included a commitment to “deport pro-Hamas radicals and make our college campuses safe and patriotic again”.
The counterterrorism EO also shows up in the context of a November 10 Washington Post story titled “Pro-Hamas messages intensify on college campuses” detailing how campus protesting had fallen off in recent months but left behind pro-Hamas demonstrators whose “rhetoric is more extreme.”
The Biden administration never terminated any student visa based on protest activity related to the Israel-Gaza war, according to NBC News, so the legality of expelling foreign nationals for these kinds of offenses has not been tested.
Human rights advocates insist the First Amendment protects visa holders from revocation and deportation, and they have vowed to sue over any effort to do so. No one is saying much about the ability of U.S. State Department visa adjudicators in U.S. consulates abroad being able to run ideology tests, probably because they have more leeway abroad.
Facing public outrage and perhaps anticipating a Trump win at home, though, some colleges ran into litigation trouble for trying to crack down on the genocidal pro-Hamas demonstrations based on school policy violations, lawsuits worth watching as potential harbingers of rulings that might influence litigation over visa-revocation and deportation of demonstrators on grounds that they were simply vile.
“No administration has ever really tried to do this,” Ben Wizner, director of the American Civil Liberties Union’s Speech, Privacy and Technology Project, told NBC News. “It would be an incredibly novel and extreme policy to remove people from the country simply for their political advocacy in a country that was founded on treasonous political advocacy.”
Republican lawmakers have proposed amendments to the Immigration and Nationality Act more explicitly allowing for government officials to consider ineligible for immigration benefits anyone who might “endorse or espouse terrorist activities” on behalf of terrorist groups that include Hamas and Hezbollah. A law like that may smooth the way for revocation of existing visas.
And if there’s a silver lining anywhere in this coming policy for its advocates, it may just be that State Department adjudicators examining visa applications overseas probably can just start saying no to any new potential demonstrators — and no to renewals for those still here, which would enable forced removals if they refuse to leave.
Decoding Trump’s Border Counterterrorism Order, Part 2
A Center for Immigration Studies database of national security vetting failures offers Trump 2.0 a big head start on the executive order to fix broken processes
By Todd Bensman as published January 28, 2025 by the Center for Immigration Studies
Remember the term of political art “extreme vetting” from the Trump 1.0 immigration agenda? It reflected the idea that U.S. government should aggressively screen (vet) all immigrant visa applicants to weed out applicants who might pose potential terrorism and public safety threats.
Or, as the Oxford Dictionary now describes its “extreme vetting” addition: “the process of checking everything about a person’s background and character to decide whether to allow them to enter the US”. The administration of Joe Biden ditched the whole idea.
But now a bigger and much more ambitious version of “extreme vetting” is on the front burner again, put there with Trump’s inauguration day executive order titled “Protecting the United States from Foreign Terrorists and Other National Security and Public Safety Threats”.
Its central thrust is to restore, repair, and expand national security vetting across every agency that might touch immigration. Boiled down, it says: Let no immigrant into the United States — nor (and this is new) allow those who already got into the country under the prior administration stay — who have not been “vetted and screened to the maximum degree possible … to protect citizens from aliens who intend to commit terrorist attacks, threaten our national security, espouse hateful ideology, or otherwise exploit the immigration laws for malevolent purposes.”
That is very tall and wide order compared to the previous iteration, especially in the repair and improvement envisioned by the executive order.
It is in the repair and improvement area that the Trump administration will find a helpful jumpstart from a Center for Immigration Studies database of vetting failures published in March 2023 and regularly updated since.
The “National Security Vetting Failures Database” is a compilation of 50 heavily analyzed vetting failure cases that identify terrorists, spies, human rights violators and other bad guys who got into the United States and did bad things despite red flags that government adjudicators should reasonably have detected beforehand using routine techniques. Each case, reverse engineered from prosecution court documents and other public information, pinpoints how government screeners in a half-dozen named agencies (U.S. State Department’s foreign consular and embassy stations the most) missed one or more glaring opportunities to short-circuit the potentially dangerous entries from 2008 through 2024.
The database’s purpose is to serve as a starting point for government officials at times like right now, when policy directs high and focused interest on fixing identifiable flaws.
The Trump executive order calls for a thoughtful plan of vetting restoration with fixes dating to at least the day before the Biden administration entered office.
It calls on all the nation’s top homeland security leaders, for instance, to “re-establish a uniform baseline for screening and vetting standards and procedures that existed on January 19, 2021, that will be used for any alien seeking a visa or immigration benefit of any kind … particularly those aliens coming from regions or nations with identified security risks”.
Those running U.S. visa-issuance processes will have to “evaluate and adjust” regulations, policies, procedures, and provisions of the Foreign Service Manual’s “grounds for inadmissibility to ensure the continued safety and security of the American people and our constitutional republic”.
But the CIS failures database shows there is probably much more repair work to be done in the U.S. national security screening wheelhouse than Trump 2.0 realizes because the egregious failures dating from 2008 to just the past year indicate deeper systemic flaws that have persisted for years after the 9/11 terrorist attacks, when the federal government first seriously reformed national security vetting systems. (See: “9/11+20: America still struggles to vet entering foreigners for national interest threats”.)
A Roadmap to Failure
The CIS database provides a roadmap to failures and the worst vetting failure offender agencies, led by U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services abroad (refugee applications) and at home (immigration change of status applications) and the U.S. State Department’s Bureau of Consular Affairs stations abroad (most immigrant and non-immigrant visa applications). Other agencies have messed up, too, including the Department of Defense (a Military Accessions Vital to the National Interest (MAVNI) visa approval of a Chinese spy and a diplomatic visa to a Saudi terrorist), the Department of Homeland Security, ICE’s Office of Principle Legal Advisor, and Customs and Border Protection (who let in a Russian terrorist later convicted in California).
The most common crime type in the database where vetting failures allowed entry was terrorism, with a total of 38 failures laid bare.
One of the most recent terrorist additions was an Afghan evacuee from the August 2021 fall of Kabul who now stands charged with multiple offenses that include a mass-casualty firearms suicide attack plot for Election Day 2024.
Nasir Ahmad Tawhedi, a former CIA guard back home, was allowed to enter the United States on September 9, 2021, as part of a mass Special Immigrant Visa parole program for Afghans. In October 2024, the FBI arrested the 27-year-old and another co-conspirator from Afghanistan who got in on the SIV. Biden government officials swore he’d been thoroughly vetted no less than three times before being approved and that no red flags turned up.
Then they backtracked, admitting later that no government agency had ever vetted Tawhedi at any point.
Another recent addition was an 18-year-old Egyptian student at Virginia’s George Mason University who currently stands charged with multiple terrorism offenses related to a mass casualty plot on Israel’s consulate in New York. Abdullah Ezzeldin Taha Mohamed Hassan entered the United States in July 2022 as a juvenile on an unspecified visa type.
But had any adjudicator bothered to check his social media, they would have found the youngster was thoroughly radicalized as an Islamic terrorist. We know this now because, according to court documents, the FBI found his social media accounts shortly after he entered the United States and were alarmed enough to interview, but not arrest, the boy. The chance to stop him was during whatever vetting had occurred overseas.
The database is chock full of Chinese spies who could have been blocked from entry, but weren’t, and human rights violators who committed atrocities in other countries but were able to slip past American adjudicators to find years of refuge from justice in American neighborhoods.
With Trump’s new executive order out on national security vetting, the CIS database’s purpose statement should resonate now as almost eerily familiar.
“Its purpose is to serve as a constant reminder to the American public and to government employees in a position to effect remedies that they are obliged to do so as soon as practicable,” reads the database explainer titled “Learning from Our Mistakes”. “Additionally, the database points America’s homeland security establishment and its congressional overseers to previously unidentified fail points in the highly complex immigration security screening array so that they may more ably block future entries of foreign threat actors.”
Decoding Trump’s Border Counterterrorism Order, Part 3
Watch for the return of a bigger, improved misnamed “Muslim Travel Ban”
By Todd Bensman as published January 29, 2025 by the Center for Immigration Studies
By Todd Bensman as published January 29, 2025 by the Center for Immigration Studies
AUSTIN, Texas – Not so very long ago, political opponents of 45th President Donald Trump deliberately misnamed one of his signature immigration policies the “Muslim Travel Ban” and cast it as the poster child for all that that was racist, intolerant, and immoral about that presidency.
So terrible did Democrats regard the travel restrictions list – which sharply curtailed issuance of visas to anyone who hailed from 13 highly dysfunctional countries – that Joe Biden’s 2019-2020 presidential campaign reserved center stage real estate for it and proudly cancelled it on Inauguration Day 2021 in his “Proclamation on Ending Discriminatory Bans on Entry to The United States,” one of 17 executive orders.
But on his inauguration day as 47th president, Trump 2.0 signed the short but action-packed Executive Order “Protecting the United States From Foreign Terrorists and Other National Security and Public Safety Threats,” which sets the stage for the travel ban’s return as a bigger and more expansive iteration of its controversial ancestor. Surprisingly, given its tumultuous political past, this lightning rod of an immigration-related national security policy has escaped almost any media attention and analysis.
Its return should not surprise anyone, as Trump on the campaign trail often promised he would reinstate his “famous travel ban.”
“I will ban refugee resettlement from terror infested areas like the Gaza Strip, and we will seal our border and bring back the travel ban,” Trump promised, for instance, at a September 2024 speech. “Remember the famous travel ban? We didn’t take people from certain areas of the world? We’re not taking them from infested countries.”
But now we have the follow-through and details of that promise, found in this executive order.
For starters, this highly consequential executive order is all about re-emphasizing national security screening and “vetting” to weed out Islamist terrorists and other forms of undesired public safety threats from among the millions of foreign nationals who annually apply for immigrant and non-immigrant visas of all kinds, from refugees to tourists while they are still abroad. (See Decoding Trump’s Border Counterterrorism Order Part 2). But unusually and almost certainly controversially, it also puts the world on notice that the United States intends to backdate the vetting check to deport many already let into the country, such as pro-Hamas demonstrators at college campuses, as Decoding Trump’s Border Counterterrorism Order, Part 1 explains.
The order sets the table for the new travel ban by generally declaring the United States will “vet and screen to the maximum degree possible all aliens who intend to be admitted, enter, or are already inside the United States, particularly those aliens coming from regions or nations with identified security risks. [author emphasis]”
The main clue that the travel ban is authorized here to return in a bigger and more expansive way comes soon after in Section 2(b). It directs the Secretary of State, Attorney General, Secretary of Homeland Security and the Director of National Intelligence to, by March 1, identify “countries throughout the world for which vetting and screening information is so deficient as to warrant a partial or full suspension on the admission of nationals from those countries.”
And this part is new. The United States national security enterprise, the order commands, will endeavor to locate foreign nationals from that list who were already admitted into the country in recent years, and deport them.
The order commands that, once those countries are identified and submitted to an “Assistant to the President for Homeland Security” the nation’s top national security leadership “take immediate steps to exclude or remove that alien” when information supports “exclusion or removal.” Unless removal gets in the way of an active investigation, of course.
A vastly misunderstood but sensible security policy
Trump’s political opponents so often misconstrued the real purpose of his “famous travel ban” that most Americans probably still have no idea what it did and why his administration deems it so necessary.
The travel ban addresses a real national security problem, which is to significantly reduce the issuance of visas to people from countries of terrorism concern or other public safety concerns that don’t, won’t, or can’t cooperate with American security-vetting processes that are at the heart of Trump’s border counterterrorism directive.
Consider for a moment how American security vetting officials would check the backgrounds of foreign nationals from the original 13 countries that were on that list – Iran, Libya, Somalia, Sudan, Syria, Yemen, North Korea, Burma, Eritrea, Kyrgyzstan, Nigeria, Venezuela and Tanzania. In Libya, there is no government to ask for security information. For 30 years, Somalia had no government at all to issue birth certificates, driver licenses, or to arrest criminals and terrorists.
How would American screeners ever be able to phone North Korea’s infamously adversarial dictator for help on anyone asking to enter the United States from that benighted nation? How about Syria, whose last government was listed as a State Sponsor of Terrorism and, in alignment with Iran and Hezbollah, officially hated the United States and probably would have loved to see it attacked. Now, an al-Qaeda aligned terrorist group has taken over Syria. And Yemen, run by an America-hating, Iran-backed designated terrorist group called the Houthis that the U.S. Navy and Air Force have repeatedly attacked in recent months.
Some countries are simply on the list because they have gone entirely ungoverned for years and therefore have no useful information to share with Americans asking for intelligence information or criminal history.
Take Sudan. Whether South Sudan or North Sudan since the country’s fuzzy political partition into two countries some years ago, the whole region is pre-modern, an almost ungoverned morass of tribal hatreds and conflicts where toilets, let alone computer databases, are in short supply and police and intelligence services are uninterested in anything beyond keeping this or that patron leader in power.
None of this should be hard to understand as a rationale for sharply limiting the entries of people from these countries who can’t be reliably vetted for past involvements with local anti-American, atrocity-committing militias and designated terrorist groups that operate in those countries.
A list almost certain to expand by leaps and bounds
Indeed, because times have changed since the travel ban on was last in effect, the incoming administration will almost certainly expand the original list of problematic countries beyond the 13 that were last on it. And vastly expand the workload on U.S. investigators who will be tasked with back-vetting aliens from those countries already let into the United States.
Trump has already named Gaza, of course, and there’s the West Bank too.
But there are many other worthwhile candidates. Since the travel ban was last in effect, for instance, Afghanistan has changed hands from an US-backed friendly government to the hostile U.S.-designated terrorist group known as the Taliban, which would not likely willing to help suss out possible terrorists applying for US visas.
There’s the Democratic Republic of Congo, a premodern state wracked by civil war, infested with a significant ISIS franchise, atrocity-committing militias, and probably useless record-keeping systems on anyone, let alone criminals.
Tajikistanis have conducted horrific terror attacks in Russia and Europe and were the targets of a major FBI counterterrorism sting investigation inside the United States last year that resulted in the arrests and deportations of eight Tajiks let in over the southern border. The U.S. let in at least one over the southern border as part of the CBP-One humanitarian parole application process, which Biden administration officials swore provided robust security vetting.
In October 2024, one of some 20,000 Mauritanian illegal border crossers who have entered in recent years staged a wild terror attack on an Orthodox Jewish neighborhood in Chicago, wounding one Jewish man before police shot and wounded him. (See: First Blood series, parts 1-3, CIS January 2025)
Perhaps most interestingly, some new countries will likely join the list for reasons having nothing to do with international Islamic terrorism. We can expect this because the executive order commands that homeland security consider countries if their citizens can’t be screened for certain unspecified “public safety threats.”
No one can yet say how that part of the order ends up expanding the list, but one might imagine, for instance, that U.S.-adversarial Venezuela would remain on the list for a new reason, because thousands of vicious “Tren de Aragua” gangsters from that country made their way over the southern border into 17 U.S. states in recent years.
El Salvador might wind up on the list, given the prevalence of MS-13 gang members who have crossed too.
And most potentially interesting would be China, whose spies have been caught and prosecuted posing as students and researchers so they could exfiltrate cutting edge defense-related U.S. technology and research. And whose citizens have crossed the southern border in recent years by the tens of thousands. (See: Bensman congressional testimony before the House Homeland Security Committee, Subcommittee on Oversight, Investigations and Accountability)
An ample record of cases a travel ban could have prevented
The new administration has given itself a lot of work with this ambitious executive order, particularly the directive that adjudicator back-vet foreign nationals who are already present.
But many past cases of terrorists caught from countries on the original list and good candidates for the new one suggest the program will prove to be effective.
Take, for example, the 2018 terrorism case in which federal prosecutors charged a Somali refugee couple resettled in Tucson with 11 counts of repeatedly lying on their initial 2013 refugee applications in ungoverned Mogadishu and later again on their permanent legal residency applications in Tucson about everything they entered, to include even their names.
Most notably, though, Mohamed Abdirahman Osman and his wife Zeinab Abdirahman Mohamad never let on that he was an al-Shabaab terrorist fighter, as was his brother and entire extended family. Nor that he provided aid and $32,000 in support to the brother after the brother coordinated a May 24, 2014, suicide bombing of a Djibouti restaurant and became an international fugitive.
US taxpayers would have been spared the danger and prosecution expense had Trump’s travel ban been in place then.
Consider the case of Gaafar Muhammed Ebrahim Al-Wazer, 25, a Yemeni who made legal entry into the United States in 2014: He swore on his visa applications while in front of an American officer in the US embassy that he had no affiliations with the Houthi rebels.
Not long after he settled in Altoona, Pa., did the FBI learn via a tip that Al-Wazer had fought with the rebels and was posting all about it on social media: He allegedly unburdened himself of increasingly fervent hatreds on his Facebook page, where he wished “death to all Americans, especially Jews,” and vowed he would stay on the path of violent jihad.
The Bureau found online photos showing a heavily armed Al-Wazer and his brother with the Houthi rebels in Yemen.
Consider the more recent case of Afghan national Nasir Ahmad Tawhedi, a former CIA office guard in Afghanistan who came in among 100,000 Afghan evacuees on special immigrant visas during the Biden administration and now stands charged with plotting a violent election day attack on behalf of ISIS. Government investigative reports say that many of those Afghans later were discovered to be unacceptable terrorism security risks. Biden administration officials said they’d thoroughly vetted Tawhedi three different times but later admitted he’d never been vetted by anyone.
Then there was the terrorism case against 21-year-old Sudanese citizen Mahmoud Amin Mohamed Elhassan, who entered the United States with his siblings and mother on temporary Legal Permanent Resident visas. At the time, Sudan was a U.S.-designated State Sponsor of Terrorism and would not have been willing – or, frankly, even able – to provide American adjudicators with any intelligence or background history about Elhassan for a thorough security vetting.
Within a year of his arrival, Elhassan was on social media espousing violent, anti-American jihad under a pseudonym, according to court records from his later terrorism prosecution. The FBI got on to him in late 2015 and by 2016, just before Trump was elected and shuttered almost all visas for Sudan under his travel ban; Elhassan pleaded guilty to plotting with a co-conspirator to “chop heads” with ISIS in Syria. Shortly before Trump implemented the travel ban, a Virginia judge sentenced him to 11 years in prison on terrorism charges.
These few cases are among many others that, had a travel ban like Trump’s been in place, may never have happened.
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