Trump Ordered an Intelligence Report to Justify His Travel Ban. This is What He Got.
Citizenship is an “unlikely indicator” of an individual's threat to the U.S., it found.
The Department of Homeland Security has concluded that citizenship is an “unlikely indicator” of whether an individual poses a terror threat to the US, according to a draft report obtained by the Associated Press.
US president Donald Trump had ordered an intelligence report to justify his embattled travel ban on seven Muslim majority nations. But the three-page draft “challenges Trump’s core claims” about the reasoning behind the executive order, the AP writes. The report also found hardly any terror-related activities in the US linked to people from the seven countries listed in the travel ban.
Trump cited terrorism concerns as the motivation for his January order banning US entry to citizens of Iraq, Syria, Iran, Sudan, Libya, Somalia and Yemen. The DHS report suggests—as many of Trump’s critics suspected—that those seven countries wouldn’t really be the best ones to group in a category based on terror threats to the US. All they really have in common is that they’re predominantly Muslim. The report also notes that more than half of terror suspects it looked at were US citizens born in the United States.
The travel ban was blocked by a federal court earlier this month. A revised order is reportedly in the works.
Meanwhile, the White House is pushing back against the AP’s story on the DHS report. A senior administration official told the Wall Street Journal, “This is not the intelligence assessment the president asked for.”
A spokeswoman from DHS also said that the report the AP looked at was “incomplete.” Though she didn’t dispute its conclusions, she said it didn’t take all available information from different intelligence agencies into account.
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