The American Anti-Arab Discrimination Committee (ADC) invited attorney Hassan Ahmad today to do a “deep dive” into the Muslim Ban 2.0 today, going over a lot of the policy considerations and details of the new ban. 

• The ban is a bigotry-flavored self-licking ice cream cone: national security experts and DHS have all agreed and stated that such bans are misguided and actually undermine national security, yet the administration persists.
• Enforce a ban, then create the mechanism to create the facts necessary to justify it. How? By publishing regular immigration statistics, and coupling it with reporting on foreign-born terror-related crime focused on Muslim perpetrators. Over time, this will build up an alternative factual narrative the administration hopes will defeat legal challenge.
• It weakly attempts to sever the Islamophobic rhetoric of the campaign trail and the “Muslim Ban” moniker by simply stating that this is not a Muslim ban. This may be the best indication yet that it is, in fact, a Muslim ban.
• It comes down with the implementation memo to DHS, which calls for rigorous enforcement of inadmissibility laws at the ports of entry. This is the counterpart to the calls for rigorous enforcement inside the US, which led to the ICE raids we’ve seen.
• The message is still the same: “We” don’t want “you” here. Regardless of the shade of lipstick on this pig.

Follow attorney Hassan Ahmad on Twitter at @HMAesq.

Watch the video: