Trump Signs Travel Ban Full of Contradictions

Donald Trump’s new travel ban is hard to make sense of.

In a sweeping order Wednesday night, Trump fully banned travel from 12 countries: Afghanistan, Chad, Equatorial Guinea, Eritrea, Haiti, Iran, Libya, Myanmar, Somalia, Sudan, and Yemen.

The order, which is set to go into effect on June 9, targets mostly African and Muslim-majority countries, and many of the banned countries were also on Trump’s original travel ban in his first term. The new ban also partially restricts travel by nationals from an additional seven countries: Burundi, Cuba, Laos, Sierra Leone, Togo, Turkmenistan, and Venezuela.

The order includes exceptions for lawful permanent residents, existing visa holders, and certain visa holders such as Special Immigrant Visas (which many Afghans received after helping U.S. forces).

Trump framed the ban as necessary to combat terrorism and strengthen national security in a video announcement posted to social media. But if that’s the case, the order is full of contradictions.

In his video, Trump specifically cited Sunday’s attack in Colorado as why the ban is needed. “The recent attack in Boulder, Colorado, has underscored the extreme dangers posed to our country by the entry of foreign nationals who are not properly vetted, as well as those who come here as temporary visitors and overstay their visas,” he said.

But the man charged in that attack was an Egyptian national who initially arrived on a tourist visa, and Egypt isn’t even on Trump’s list of banned countries.

Trump’s order also cites visa oversays as a reason why multiple countries were targeted. But as The Washington Post reported, it’s not clear why some countries were added to the list while others with higher visa overstay rates weren’t. In some cases, the visa overstay rate was high but the total number of overstays was relatively low.

The justification listed for specific countries was a mess. The order cited the establishment of “criminal networks” and “national security threats” as justification for the ban on nationals from Haiti. But there is little evidence that Haitian gangs are taking over the U.S., nor is there much evidence that Haitian gang members are among the small number of Haitians entering the country.

“Haitians as a group have not exerted any kind of violence,” Renata Segura, director of the Latin America and Caribbean program at the International Crisis Group, told the Post. “The idea that Haitian gangs could be traveling to the U.S. by legal means is completely out of the realm of the possible.”

And in the case of Venezuela, which is facing partial restrictions, Trump’s order claims the country has “historically refused to accept back its removable nationals.” But in the past few months of Trump’s second term, Venezuela has repeatedly accepted Trump’s deportation flights, even sending Venezuelan planes to pick up immigrant deportees from the U.S.

For those trying to make sense of Trump’s logic with this order, don’t even bother.

President Trump is still trying to turn President Joe Biden’s autopen use into a real scandal, announcing an investigation Wednesday into the pen and its role in an alleged coverup of Biden’s cognitive decline. The former president immediately slammed the move.

“Let me be clear: I made the decisions during my presidency. I made the decisions about the pardons, executive orders, legislation, and proclamations,” Biden said in a statement. “Any suggestion that I didn’t is ridiculous and false.... This is nothing more than a distraction by Donald Trump and Congressional Republicans who are working to push disastrous legislation that would cut essential programs like Medicaid and raise costs on American families, all to pay for tax breaks for the ultra-wealthy and big corporations.”

Trump has been accusing Biden of using an autopen—essentially a signature machine to aid presidents in signing multiple bills in one sitting—for months now, in an attempt to create both a corruption scandal and a cognitive decline scandal around the former president. At one point, Trump even suggested that Senator Elizabeth Warren was using the autopen in place of Biden.

“With the exception of the RIGGED PRESIDENTIAL ELECTION OF 2020, THE AUTOPEN IS THE BIGGEST POLITICAL SCANDAL IN AMERICAN HISTORY!!!” Trump posted on Truth Social Wednesday.

The autopen is nowhere near as big of a deal as Trump is making it out to be, if at all. Presidents Lyndon B. Johnson, John F. Kennedy, Barack Obama, and Trump himself have all used it, although Trump swears it’s “only for very important papers.”

For this to be at the top of Trump’s mind while his One Big Beautiful Bill Act is in the midst of Senate gridlock shows how much of a nothingburger this issue is—especially compared to the myriad of scandalous events surrounding Trump’s own tenure as president.

Despite kowtowing and bowing its head, Columbia University is now the victim of more attacks from the Trump administration.

The Department of Education challenged the Ivy League school’s accreditation Wednesday, writing to the Middle States Commission on Higher Education, which accredits Columbia, that the university had violated civil rights law in its handling of on-campus protests supporting Palestine.

“After Hamas’ October 7, 2023, terror attack on Israel, Columbia University’s leadership acted with deliberate indifference towards the harassment of Jewish students on its campus,” said Education Secretary Linda McMahon in a statement. “This is not only immoral, but also unlawful.”

“Just as the Department of Education has an obligation to uphold federal antidiscrimination law, university accreditors have an obligation to ensure member institutions abide by their standards,” McMahon noted.

The request itself does not revoke Columbia’s accreditation. However, the government urged the Middle States Commission to “take appropriate action” if Columbia failed to come into compliance with Title VI of the Civil Rights Act of 1964. The university would be unable to operate without its accreditation.

The challenge comes as Columbia continues its fight to recoup hundreds of millions of dollars in federal funding canceled by the White House in March on claims that university leadership had promulgated antisemitism.

But Columbia University has proven to be just one of many targets that the Trump administration has singled out in its quest to subdue criticism of America’s involvement in Palestinian genocide. Individually, the administration went after Mohsen Mahdawi and Mahmoud Khalil, Palestinian student leaders at Columbia University who participated in the protests.

In April, a federal judge handed Mahdawi his freedom after he was arrested at what he thought was his citizenship interview, claiming that the uncharged scholar’s two-week detention was unfounded.

Last week, a district judge denied Khalil—a Columbia graduate student and green card holder—his request for a preliminary injunction to temporarily halt his deportation proceedings.

In March, the Trump administration raided what they called a Tren de Arauga gang gathering in Texas, arresting dozens of people at five in the morning.

Two months later, The Texas Tribune reports that none of the people they arrested had any gang ties or even criminal records, and that the “Tren de Aragua gathering” they busted was in fact a birthday party. Forty-seven people were arrested in total, including nine children, although it’s unclear if every person taken in was at the birthday party.

The ICE agents and Texas police who raided the birthday party even went so far as to attack the families with flash grenades, scaring them and their children.

“We all started shouting that there were babies—‘Babies, there’s babies,’” said one of the arrested men, who said he was celebrating the fifth birthday of his son and the 28th birthday of his best friend at a house they rented for the weekend. “They were like bombs, like boom.”

ICE also profiled one of the party attendees for his tattoos, based on a thoroughly debunked theory that Tren de Aragua members have specific ink.

“They told me to my face: ‘You know what those stars mean? Those stars are styled by gangsters in your country,’” he told the Tribune. “I said, no. I got these stars when—no kidding—I was starting to leave adolescence, started working. I got them because I liked them and I wanted to get them.”

While ICE has refused to name the detained Venezuelans, the Tribune identified 35 of them. Some were in ICE detention for weeks and were released with ankle monitors. One of the children was even kicked out of school due to missing too many days in detainment. Again, none were charged criminally.

“This is about something much bigger. If it happens to a person who is accused of being a (gang member) today, tomorrow it could happen to you and me,” said Migration Policy Institute director Muzaffar Chishti. “And if the alleged member of this gang does not have the right to contest [charges against them], how can you know I’ll have it? The next person will have it?”

ICE has been putting innocent people through hellish, traumatic arrest events for months now, as Trump, border czar Tom Homan, and deputy chief of staff Stephen Miller march blindly ahead with trying to deport as many people as they possibly can, truth be damned.

Biden White House press secretary Karine Jean-Pierre has decided she’s no longer a Democrat, pointing to the party’s “betrayal” of President Joe Biden for her rationale.

Instead, Jean-Pierre will become a registered independent, she revealed Wednesday.

The news came by way of the announcement of Jean-Pierre’s new book, Independent: A Look Inside a Broken White House, Outside the Party Lines, which is set to be published October 21.

“Jean-Pierre didn’t come to her decision to be an Independent lightly, she has served two American presidents, Obama and Biden,” her publisher, Legacy Lit, wrote in a press blurb for the book. “In 2020, she joined Biden’s campaign as a senior adviser, becoming Harris’s chief of staff and then, two years later, White House press secretary.

“She takes us through the three weeks that led to Biden’s abandoning his bid for a second term and the betrayal by the Democratic Party that led to his decision,” the publisher continued.

Independent promises to spill tea on the internal party drama that led to Vice President Kamala Harris’s presidential nomination, as told by the Biden official most frequently positioned to defend his health and ongoing candidacy.

Swapping party affiliation is definitely an unorthodox way to market one’s upcoming book, but considering the wide range of texts focusing on Biden’s final hour that are already competing for bookstore shelf space, perhaps an unconventional approach is needed. Jean-Pierre’s will be one of many analyses of Biden’s tenure in the White House, with a particular focus on the historic end of his bid for reelection.

Last month, Axios’s national political correspondent Alex Thompson and CNN host Jake Tapper released Original Sin: President Biden’s Decline, Its Cover-Up, and His Disastrous Choice to Run Again, the culmination of interviews with more than 200 individuals attached to the Biden White House. Fight: Inside the Wildest Battle for the White House, co-authored by journalists Jonathan Allen and Amie Parnes, was published April 1.

Chris Whipple, who examined Biden’s 2020 win, wrote a slim investigation called Uncharted: How Trump Beat Biden, Harris, and the Odds in the Wildest Campaign in History. Another book, 2024: How Trump Retook the White House and the Democrats Lost America, is the result of more than 300 interviews conducted over an 18-month period. It’s co-written by Josh Dawsey, Tyler Pager, and Isaac Arnsdorf, and is expected out July 3.

And Biden himself has promised to pen his own account, with plans to publish a book next year, according to sources that spoke with The Guardian.

But the decision to exit the Democratic Party comes at a particularly awkward time for Jeane-Pierre, who was the first Black and openly LGBTQ individual to serve as White House press secretary. She will be pulling her support from the only major LGBTQ-friendly party at a time when the Trump administration continues to attack and rescind gay and transgender rights, and weeks before she is scheduled to act as one of the grand marshalls of the New York City Pride march, alongside TV personality Michelle Visage, transgender activists Miss Major and Raquel Willis, and GLAAD executive DaShawn Usher.