—The Quran, 5:8
(Washington, D.C., 7/23/2020) The US Council of Muslim Organizations, on behalf of our members and American Muslims, laud House passage yesterday of the NO BAN Act, “the first civil rights bill in history that explicitly protects Muslims by rejecting Trump and Stephen Miller’s xenophobia and white nationalism,” as Vanita Gupta, president and CEO of The Leadership Conference on Civil & Human Rights noted in her statement welcoming approval of H.R. 2214, the National Origin-Based Antidiscrimination for Nonimmigrants Act.
The immigration bill aims to repeal Trump’s thinly veiled travel ban based on religion – Islam in particular – for people from 13 countries, which effectively bars an astonishing 135 million people worldwide, and more than a quarter of all Africans, from petitioning for US residence.
The NO BAN Act also rightly seeks to prevent future US presidents from the demagogic temptation of tampering with divisive immigration exclusions, while at the same time fortifying existing prohibitions on religious discrimination in visa applications, ostensibly protected by the Immigration and Nationality Act (INA). Current INA law itemizes “race, sex, nationality, place of birth, and place of residence” pretexts for discriminating against would-be immigrants, but leaves religion open as a backdoor avenue to bigoted bans like Trump’s current American humiliation.
The NO BAN Act contains amendments to existing law that would render all US travel restrictions temporary, dependent on plausible evidence, permanently removed from presidential whim by the power of congressional oversight, limited to foreign entities that have threatened the US, and conditioned on meeting the bar of a more specifically defined, convincing government interest.
“These changes will “ensure that future presidents would not be allowed to issue orders based so clearly on anti-Muslim bias or any other religion-based animus and that every visa applicant would receive individual consideration,” notes a statement from the National Immigration Law Center.
It also leaves intact, unfortunately with redundant explicitness, the capacity for American presidents to protect the country from the spread of contagions, which has become Trump’s and his lapdog Republicans’ latest scant fig leaf cover for the naked racism and religious nationalism of their shameful Muslim Ban.
Nonetheless, the NO BAN bill – along with its sister legislation, The Access to Counsel Act, also passed by the House yesterday, similarly along party lines – remains part of a Band-Aid fix for what has become the gaping wound of US Immigration policy. The Access legislation would let immigrants detained at the border, by politically triggered US Customs and Border Protection or US Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents, the seemingly basic human right of contacting legal help within an hour of their detention.
Immigration advocates have learned from the chaos Trump’s original 2017 Muslim ban sowed at airports and border crossings across the country. The same disorderly confusion appeared again this year when custom agents began systematically stopping traveling Americans and Canadians of Iranian descent to interrogate them about their politics and allegiances, giving them no access to counsel.
These agents have in the past showed no compunction about trying to “persuade” people to “voluntarily” vacate their own legal US immigration status.
Based on these behaviors, the Act seeks limits on lengths of detention and according the detained the basic rights (one would think) of food, water, and using restrooms. Still, the bill’s efficacy remains limited. Many immigrants have deficits in English, money, and awareness of how to avail themselves of legal rights and help.
The Act’s biggest failing, however, affects not those coming from majority Muslim countries so much, but the thousands of immigrants currently arriving from Mexico, Guatemala, El Salvador, and Honduras. It doesn’t address the current scandal of so-called “field processing” centers, that do not even allow migrants and asylum seekers to reach the border, and that – within just 96 minutes on average, have sent some 69,000 such people back into Mexico for repatriation or deportation since March, according to US Customs and Border Protection reports. Nor did these mostly beleaguered souls receive so much as a medical exam, much less access to legal counsel.
Finally, we are aware that the NO BAN and Access acts are both unlikely to even reach the floor of the Senate, shielded behind the Soviet-reminiscent Iron Curtain of the Mitch McConnell, Republican-led body. We consider this partisan intransigence, however, a just public exposure of their listless “leadership” and blatant bigotry.
It also serves to highlight the significance of Democratic presidential candidate Joe Biden’s promise directly made to Muslim organizations in an online forum on Monday, that he would blot out the Muslim ban “on day one” of his presidency.
The US Council of Muslim Organizations and the American Muslim community express our appreciation for the House’s passage of both the NO BAN Act and The Access to Counsel Act. Yet we duly call upon its members to realize the good intention of both with comprehensive, just, and humane legislative immigration reform, knowing this undergirds both the strength and moral coherence of this nation and in the world.
Moreover, we at the US Council of Muslim Organizations and the American Muslim communities we represent stand with the beset asylum seekers and immigrants from Mexico and Central America. They face devastating, often life-threatening circumstances at home for their families and an increasingly lethal discrimination and shattering loss at our own shamefully unwelcoming borders. Simultaneously, we affirm the God-given sacredness of their lives and the legitimacy of their human aspirations for peace, security, and a semblance of prosperity.
We thus call upon our too-hesitant political leaders and our often-faltering judicial authorities to bring America to a humane, rights-based comprehensive immigration reform befitting of an enlightened, world-leading nation.
