A week after Trump’s inauguration, on January 27, 2017, Jim Mattis was ceremonially sworn in as the twenty-sixth secretary of defense of the United States at the Pentagon’s Hall of Heroes, a hallowed space that memorializes the names of every service member awarded the Medal of Honor, the highest award for valor in the nation.* Vice President Pence administered the oath of office to Mattis, after which President Trump remarked, “Mattis is a man of honor, a man of devotion, and a man of total action. He likes action.”
After Mattis was sworn in, Trump used the backdrop of the Hall of Heroes to sign an executive order for the set of measures known as the travel ban. As he signed the order, Trump said new vetting would be instituted “to keep radical Islamic terrorists out of the United States of America—we don’t want them here. . . . We only want to admit into our country those who will support our country and love, deeply, our people.”
It was the first time a president had employed the Hall of Heroes as a political prop, much less in the context of the swearing-in ceremony of a new secretary of defense. As the commander in chief, Trump could do pretty much as he liked at the Pentagon, but it was an odd display as far as Mattis was concerned, though he kept his views largely to himself. Mattis strongly believed that the military needed to remain apolitical because that’s how you maintained the trust of the public. If the military was seen as a political pawn of a particular administration, you chipped away at that crucial public trust.
One of Trump’s signature ideas on the campaign trail, of course, had been a ban on Muslim immigrants from countries that were known to harbor terrorists. During the presidential transition, Abdul Razak Ali Artan, an ISIS-inspired terrorist, rammed a car into a group of students at Ohio State University, injuring eleven. Artan was a legal permanent US resident originally from Somalia. Days later, Trump spoke at a massive victory rally in Des Moines. He said the Ohio State attack was “yet one more tragic reminder that immigration security is now national security. No more games, folks, no more games. A Trump administration will always put the safety and security of the American people first.”
Following an attack in Germany by an ISIS supporter at a Christmas market in Berlin that killed twelve, Trump made remarks at Mar-a-Lago that appeared to again call for a crackdown, telling reporters who asked him about his proposals to ban Muslim immigration, “You know my plans. All along I’ve been proven to be right. One hundred percent correct.”
The executive order that Trump signed on January 27 banned the entry of any Syrian refugees into the United States indefinitely. It was widely pointed out that it was highly unlikely that there were terrorists among the few Syrian refugees who were then settling in the United States. The United States had accepted only a very small number of Syrian refugees: at the time Trump signed the order, the United States had taken in only around fifteen thousand Syrian refugees, the large majority women and children, less than 1 percent of the total number of Syrian refugees, estimated to be nearly five million people. It was also widely noted that not only were these Syrian refugees not terrorists, they were fleeing the brutal state-sponsored terrorism of the Syrian dictator Bashar al-Assad as well as the brutal nonstate terrorism of ISIS. These refugees were the victims of terrorism, not its perpetrators.
Any ISIS terrorist with an ounce of common sense was quite unlikely to try to infiltrate the United States posing as a Syrian refugee. Officials from the Department of Homeland Security, FBI, National Counterterrorism Center, Pentagon, and State Department scrutinized any Syrian refugee trying to get into the United States. They also had to give up their biometric data—scans of their retinas, for instance—submit their detailed biographic histories, and undergo lengthy interviews. These refugees were also queried against a number of government databases to see if they might pose a threat. The whole process could take two years, sometimes more.
Leon Rodriguez, a top US immigration official, testified at a 2015 hearing of the Senate Homeland Security Committee that of all the tens of millions of people who were trying to get into the United States every year, “refugees get the most scrutiny and Syrian refugees get the most scrutiny of all.” By contrast, Syrian refugees fleeing to Europe did not go through anything like the rigorous process experienced by those who were coming to the States, and the volume of Syrians fleeing to Europe was orders of magnitude larger than it was to the United States.
Along with the ban on Syrian refugees, the Trump executive order also suspended travel from seven Muslim-majority countries for a period of three months: Iran, Iraq, Libya, Somalia, Sudan, Syria, and Yemen. Nationals of those countries would be subjected to what Trump described as “extreme vetting.” Many of these countries didn’t have US embassies, either because the situation on the ground was too dangerous, as with Yemen, or because they didn’t have diplomatic relations with the United States, as with Iran, so enforcing a higher degree of scrutiny on the citizens of those countries was sensible.
As a counterterrorism measure, however, it didn’t make sense. None of the terrorists who had conducted deadly jihadist attacks in the United States since 9/11 had emigrated from or were born into a family that had emigrated from a country that was the subject of the Trump administration’s travel ban. Indeed, all of the post-9/11 terrorists in the United States who had carried out lethal attacks were “homegrown” American citizens or legal permanent residents. Of the twelve terrorists who carried out these lethal attacks between 9/11 and when Trump assumed office, three were African Americans, three were from families that hailed originally from Pakistan, two came from Russia as children, one was born in Virginia to a family that had emigrated from the Palestinian Territories, one emigrated from Egypt and carried out an attack a decade after arriving, and one each had families that originally came from Kuwait and Afghanistan. None of these countries was on the travel ban list. The travel ban was, in short, a solution in search of a problem that didn’t exist. No matter, it was a campaign promise and the Trump administration moved quickly to implement it.
The execution of the travel ban order was a textbook case of how not to govern because it caught the agencies that were supposed to implement it completely by surprise. National Security Council staffers received a copy of the executive order on the morning of Tuesday, January 24, and were given forty-five minutes to send in their comments. For any such order to be successful, it needed to be vetted carefully by all the departments and agencies affected by it, which is why such orders are usually months in the making. Steve Bannon and Stephen Miller, Trump’s thirty-one-year-old domestic policy director, largely drafted the executive order, and Gorka reviewed it. Between them they had scant experience about how the government actually operated. The order was simply dumped on the departments and agencies that would have to make it work.
The executive order completely blindsided the counterterrorism directorate at the NSC because it included Iraq as one of the countries that was subject to the ban, despite the fact that Iraqi soldiers were leading the fight against ISIS.
Joshua Geltzer, the senior director for counterterrorism at the White House, recalled, “The inclusion of Iraq seemed crazy. We feared what then actually happened, which is that the Iraqis would be baffled and deeply insulted by this.” The United States’ key allies in the fight against ISIS were being treated like potential terrorists.
The rollout of the ban was a fiasco. It was publicly announced on the afternoon of Friday, January 27, and the Department of Homeland Security, the key agency in charge of enforcing the ban, was barely consulted about it. Even John Kelly, the secretary of homeland security, had almost no time to review the executive order. Kelly was on a coast guard plane flying from Miami to Washington and had dialed into a White House conference call to discuss the order as a work in progress. One of the officials on the call looked up at the TV in his office and saw that Trump was already signing the order at the Pentagon. “The president is signing the executive order we’re discussing,” said the official.
When he was in uniform, Kelly had served on Capitol Hill as the liaison between the marines and Congress. Kelly knew you didn’t just surprise senators and representatives with this kind of new directive; you briefed them ahead of time.
There was a great deal of confusion initially about who exactly was covered by the ban and whether green card holders were also included in it. When the order came down, planes were already in the air carrying the citizens of countries on the list. Chaos swiftly unfolded at airports around the United States, scenes that were carried on live TV.
Foreign leaders were flummoxed by the travel ban. British foreign secretary Boris Johnson called up Stephen Miller to tell him, “I’ve got an Iranian who has lived in the UK for thirty-five years, and he’s the world’s greatest expert on electromagnetic conduction. And he’s trying to get to Harvard for a conference, and you guys won’t give him a visa? Can you fix this for me?”
At the White House the day after the ban was announced, Trump claimed that everything was, in fact, going to plan, asserting, “It’s not a Muslim ban, but we were totally prepared. It’s working out very nicely. You see it at the airports, you see it all over.”
None of the normal government stuff had been done to lay the groundwork for the ban, such as informing the various countries around the world that would be affected by it. Four days after the order was issued, some one thousand State Department officials signed an unusual “dissent channel” cable protesting it. The channel had been set up during the Vietnam War so that diplomats could protest foreign policy decisions they opposed without fear of retaliation. It was the largest number of State Department officials ever to sign on to a dissent cable.
Senior Trump officials saw the dissent cable as a deeply unprofessional response to the unexpected transfer of power, which many Foreign Service officers didn’t handle well. Trump’s advisers felt that State Department officials just couldn’t get over the trauma of the former secretary of state, Hillary Clinton, not having won the election. It was not an auspicious start to the relationship.
The sense of chaos was magnified when the acting attorney general, Sally Yates, announced that she was advising Department of Justice lawyers not to defend the ban. Yates’s reasoning was based in part on a Trump comment that he favored the entrance of Christians from the banned countries, implying that the ban was what Trump had promised all along during his campaign: a ban on Muslims from entering the United States, which seemed to contravene the bedrock constitutional principle of freedom of religion.
Trump immediately fired Yates and found someone more compliant to act in her stead, but a few days later a federal judge stayed the executive order approving the ban, which meant that the Department of Homeland Security could no longer enforce it. Trump, without regard for the separation of powers, immediately attacked the judge on Twitter, writing, “The opinion of this so-called judge, which essentially takes law-enforcement away from our country, is ridiculous and will be overturned!” Trump also tweeted that “many very bad and dangerous people may be pouring into our country. A terrible decision.”
Trump’s call during his campaign for a “total and complete shutdown of Muslims entering the United States” hung over his advisers’ attempts to craft a ban that could withstand legal scrutiny. Miller was the most hard-core of Trump’s advisers on immigration, telling another White House official at one point, “I would be happy if not a single refugee foot ever again touched American soil.” Miller often claimed in meetings that refugees were an economic burden on the United States. In fact, an interagency review of the issue had found that refugees contributed more to the US economy than they took out.
Miller instructed Trump administration officials working in press relations to look for stories about immigrants involved in crimes and promote them to the media. Miller admonished the press relations officials: “You comms people need to get us more stories of immigrants doing bad things. You need to highlight the criminality. You’re not doing enough to get those stories out.”
The US intelligence community was asked to fix the intelligence so that it meshed with the travel ban policy and to “deliver an ex post facto intelligence justification for that which we had already decided to do,” according to a senior US intelligence official.
Again, the problem was that the intelligence actually showed that terrorist attacks in the United States didn’t involve anyone from the countries targeted by the travel ban and instead were the work of second-generation immigrants or green card holders who had largely arrived in the country as children. The terrorism problem was caused by “homegrown” American militants who were radicalizing in the United States, not by the infiltration of foreign-born terrorists from overseas as had happened on 9/11. (The ban wouldn’t have stopped the 9/11 attacks either, since the perpetrators were mostly Saudis or from other Arab countries that were not targeted by the ban.)
This senior intelligence official worried that he would be called to testify to defend the travel ban, but to his relief that never happened. The Republicans, then in control of both houses of Congress, were not eager to call witnesses who might impugn the administration’s line that the travel ban was going to make the United States safer, as opposed to a pointless exercise at best.
A Department of Homeland Security internal report that leaked in February 2017 showed that the department that was supposed to enforce the ban also found that it made little sense. The report stated that citizens of the travel ban countries were “rarely implicated in U.S.-based terrorism.”
Kellyanne Conway, the counselor to the president, who coined the memorable term “alternative facts,” defended the travel ban on MSNBC on February 2 by pointing to “the Bowling Green massacre” that had been carried out by two Iraqi refugees in Kentucky. Conway added, “Most people don’t know that because it didn’t get covered.” There was a good reason for the lack of coverage of this “massacre.” It never happened. There was, in fact, plenty of media coverage of what actually did happen, which was that the two Iraqi refugees in Bowling Green had attempted to send money and weapons to Al-Qaeda in Iraq in 2011, for which they were arrested and given long prison sentences.
To help sell the travel ban, the Trump administration continued pushing the story line that the media wasn’t giving enough coverage to terrorism. Three days after Conway’s “Bowling Green massacre” remarks, on a visit to the key US military base overseeing the war on ISIS—Central Command in Tampa, Florida—Trump claimed that the media wasn’t reporting on terrorism for “reasons” the president didn’t elaborate upon. Trump told the CENTCOM audience, “You’ve seen what happened in Paris and Nice. All over Europe, it’s happening. It’s gotten to a point where it’s not even being reported. And in many cases, the very, very dishonest press doesn’t want to report it. They have their reasons, and you understand that.”
To “prove” that the media wasn’t covering terrorism adequately, the Trump administration, still fighting in court to reinstate the travel ban, released a list of seventy-eight “major” anti-Western terrorist attacks since September 2014, claiming that “most have not received the media attention they deserved.” The only problem with this line of argument was that the list of terrorist attacks, which was “declassified” by the Trump administration, was itself based on media reports.
In fact, the total number of media hits in the Nexis media database for the seventy-eight terrorist attacks was more than eighty thousand, or an average of slightly more than one thousand media mentions per incident. And those numbers understated how much coverage the media had given these incidents because a Nexis search can only display a maximum of three thousand media citations for any given search. There were sixteen terrorist attacks on the White House list of purportedly undercovered attacks that each elicited more than three thousand media mentions. The terror attacks in Paris and Nice that Trump had cited in his CENTCOM speech, for instance, each received more than three thousand media mentions.
The terrorist attacks that didn’t get as much coverage were the ones where there were no deaths, or that took place in countries such as Saudi Arabia, where there was little independent media reporting.
The White House’s terrorism list underlined the arbitrary nature of the travel ban because, by the White House’s own account, the countries that were generating the most significant number of terrorists threatening the West were from the West. Conspicuous by their absence on the White House list of terrorists carrying out major attacks against Western targets were Iraqis, Somalis, Sudanese, and Yemenis, four of the seven Muslim countries from which the Trump administration was seeking to suspend travel.
Of the total of ninety terrorists on the White House list, at most nine were from travel ban countries. Fifty of the terrorists—more than half—were from Christian-majority countries in the West. The countries with the most terrorists carrying out or plotting anti-Western attacks were Belgium, France, and the United States, according to the White House’s own terrorism list.
Attorney General Jeff Sessions, an immigration hard-liner and a mentor to Stephen Miller, who had worked for Sessions when he was a senator, was one of the key officials pushing for the travel ban. Mary McCord, a career prosecutor who was running the National Security Division at the Justice Department that oversaw all terrorism cases, told Sessions, “Our terrorism statistics don’t support a heightened threat from the seven countries that are on the travel ban list.” McCord told Sessions that the real threat coming from overseas was the many hundreds of French and Belgian citizens who had been recruited by ISIS over the past couple of years. McCord said, “They can come here easily because they’re from France and Belgium. That’s honestly where I see a threat.” Because they were from European “visa waiver” countries, these ISIS recruits could enter the United States with little or no scrutiny.
This point didn’t seem to have any impact on Sessions, who had a deep distrust of immigrants and anyone who was from a Middle Eastern country. When he was briefed on a terrorist investigation, the first question Sessions would ask was “Where is this person from?” The next question was “Where are his parents from?”
The inclusion of Iraqis on the travel ban list was particularly galling to those in the administration who had served in Iraq. Mattis pushed back against the travel ban on the Iraqis. He well understood the key role that Iraqi forces were playing in the fight against ISIS. Sessions was adamant about the need to keep the Iraqis on the travel ban list.
The idiocy of the Iraqi travel ban was underlined when Lieutenant General Talib Shaghati, the commander of the Iraqi special forces division known as the Counter-Terrorism Service that was spearheading the military operations against ISIS, couldn’t get a visa to visit his family members living in the United States.
McMaster asked Kelly, Mattis, Tillerson, and Sessions and all of their “plus-ones” to come into his office to discuss the Iraq travel ban issue. The backbenchers filled up the sofas on the perimeter of the room, while the principals sat around a small table.
Since Sessions was leading the charge to apply the travel ban to the Iraqis, McMaster explained to the attorney general that American soldiers were fighting alongside Iraqi soldiers against ISIS in Iraq, and the travel ban was an affront to many of these Iraqis. It was an affront that could engender bad blood between the Americans and the Iraqis and therefore put US service members in a potentially dangerous situation.
Tillerson’s view was that his country team in Iraq and other specialists from the State Department could get the visa system for Iraqis brought up to the right standard so that any potential threat from those applying to travel from Iraq to the United States would be dealt with.
Sessions said, “I’m not impressed.”
In response, McMaster pulled a photograph off the wall, the only personal item in his office, and put the photo in front of Sessions and said, “Let me tell you about this man.” When McMaster had led the anti-al-Qaeda fight in Tal Afar, Iraq, in 2005, he had grown close to the mayor of the city, Najim al-Jubouri. The photograph was of Jubouri, surrounded by a sea of smiling Iraqi children, taken shortly after McMaster’s regiment had liberated their city from al-Qaeda in 2005.
McMaster told the crowd of officials in his office the story of Jubouri, how the McMaster family had sponsored him and his family on a special visa to move to the States, where he had taken a job in DC and bought a home in Northern Virginia. When ISIS seemed poised to seize all of Iraq, Jubouri had volunteered to go back to fight ISIS and was now a major general in the Iraqi army. To keep his green card status, Major General Jubouri had to return every quarter to the United States, and when he came back under the proposed travel ban, he was going to get hassled every time.
Sessions finally relented. “All right. All right. I’ll support taking Iraq off.”
In parallel, a furious Mattis went to the White House to confront Bannon in his office about the Iraqi travel ban, telling him, “We should take Iraq off the list because these guys are fully in the fight against ISIS.”
Bannon was noncommittal. “Okay. We’ll go into the Oval. The president is going to be upset because he wants to stick to this, as we should. And we’ll win in the courts with this.”
Mattis and Tillerson met with Trump in the Oval Office and made a compelling case that the Iraqis were full allies in the takedown of ISIS. Trump didn’t like anything that suggested that the list wasn’t 100 percent aboveboard, but he was willing to change his mind in the name of the fight against ISIS. “Okay,” Trump said, “if this is what we need to win, I’ll take them off.”
Trump bitched and moaned about this decision later. He would always feel that he should have gone with the first version of the travel ban.
On February 28, during the same speech to the joint session of Congress in which Trump had lauded the sacrifice of the Navy SEAL Ryan Owens, the president also claimed that “the vast majority of individuals convicted of terrorism and terrorism-related offenses since 9/11 came here from outside of our country.” This was beyond fuzzy math; it was nonsense. The only way Trump could make his figures work is if they included individuals who had come to the United States as children, those who were naturalized citizens, and terrorists who had been extradited to the United States. The real problem was no longer foreign-born terrorists entering the United States, as had happened on 9/11, it was now American citizens and legal residents who were watching ISIS propaganda online and becoming radicalized in the United States.
On March 6, the Trump administration put forward a new executive order banning travel for three months from six Muslim countries, but not Iraq, a victory for Mattis and McMaster. Two days later the state of Hawaii filed a motion to block the travel ban on the grounds that it was discriminatory.
In early June, shortly after news broke about a terrorist attack in London, President Trump tweeted: “We need to be smart, vigilant and tough. We need the courts to give us back our rights. We need the Travel Ban as an extra level of safety!”
On September 24, 2017, Trump issued a third version of the travel ban, updating the policy to apply travel restrictions to the citizens of eight countries: Chad, Iran, Libya, North Korea, Somalia, Syria, Venezuela, and Yemen. As with the two earlier versions of the travel ban, this version would not have prevented a single death from jihadist terrorism in the United States since 9/11, but by adding Chad, North Korea, and Venezuela to the list of countries facing travel restrictions, the administration was adding non-Muslim majority countries. The number of North Korean visitors to the United States was negligible, and the Venezuelan ban affected only a relatively small number of the country’s government officials and their families, but the inclusion of non-Muslim majority countries would likely shore up the legal defense of the travel ban working its way to the Supreme Court.
A reminder of what constituted the actual jihadist terrorist threat to the United States came on October 31, 2017, when Sayfullo Saipov plowed a vehicle into pedestrians walking on a crowded bike path in Manhattan not far from the World Trade Center, killing eight people. Saipov was a legal US resident who had emigrated from a non–travel ban country, Uzbekistan, seven years earlier and had radicalized while living in the United States. Saipov had downloaded thousands of ISIS images on his cell phone.
Trump said he was considering sending Saipov to Guantanamo, then changed his mind, tweeting, “Would love to send the NYC terrorist to Guantanamo but statistically that process takes much longer than going through the Federal system . . .” The Guantanamo military tribunal system was indeed a complete mess. The operational commander of 9/11, Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, known as KSM, had been captured in Pakistan in 2003. Fourteen years later, KSM’s trial at Guantanamo had yet to begin.
On June 26, 2018, the Supreme Court would uphold the third version of the travel ban. The decision was not entirely surprising since the judiciary tended to be quite deferential to the executive branch when it came to matters of national security. That same year, the Trump administration admitted only sixty-two Syrian refugees to the United States. It was estimated that some five million Syrians had been forced to flee their homes in one of the worst humanitarian crises of the modern era.
Nine decades earlier, one desperate migrant, Mary Anne MacLeod, left the quasi-medieval world of the Outer Hebrides islands in Scotland, one of the poorest regions in Europe, to find work as a servant in New York. Mary would have passed the Statue of Liberty; she may even have been familiar with the promise of the United States written on its base, from the Emma Lazarus poem: “Give me your tired, your poor, your huddled masses yearning to breathe free.” Mary later married Fred Trump. They had five children, including a son named Donald. The United States has not traditionally been the cramped, frightened country of Trump’s travel ban.