(Washington, DC.: 01/20/2021) – The US Council of Muslim Organizations (USCMO), the largest coalition of major national, regional, and local Muslim organizations and Islamic institutions, on behalf of our members and the tens of thousands of Muslim families we serve in our country, and their countless relatives here and abroad – who suffered untold trauma and hardship from the flagrant religious discrimination under the long night of once-president Donald Trump, convey our heartfelt congratulations and gratitude to President Joseph Biden for rescinding the wicked and divisive Muslim travel ban of his predecessor.
“Prohibiting Muslims from entering the country is morally wrong, and there is no intelligence or evidence that suggests it makes our nation more secure,” President Biden has stated through his campaign website. He could not be more right on both counts. Nor could the Biden presidency commence with a more auspicious inauguration than striking from the American legal record one of the most hateful, pain-making, and shameful political fiats in its history.
It marooned refugees, shattered plans on which tens of thousands counted, and callously separated families (a hideous hallmark of this last presidency). It barred the seriously ill, injured, and desperate of lifesaving healthcare; kept couples from marrying; and turned back grieving children from holding a dying mother, father, or grandparent, comforting aching eyes, one last time. Then no funerals for the Muslim loved ones. How many a student stood forsaken – long-sacrificed-for college acceptance clenched tightly – in faraway lands? What creativity, innovation, erudition did the world and its people lose from the scholarly pens held in those marked Muslim hands? Untold family gatherings, joyful celebrations, and touching of fingertips in intimacy this vile edict damned? The inhuman cruelty and human losses inflicted by the Muslim Ban we can never measure.
President Biden’s ill-favored predecessor, abetted by the high court, deployed this decree in the false name of national security – not as a mere racist, Islamophobic dog whistle – but as a straight up declaration of his intention to transmute the foundational freedoms of America – including speech, movement, press, no arbitrary arrest, assembly, association, and religious worship – in order to remake the republic into a monocracy with himself as its sovereign and his loyalists as its de facto legitimate collective. The Muslim Ban became a harbinger and an essential part of a larger megalomaniacal, narcissistic wet dream. One need not peer hard to see the full political palette with which he sought to recolor America in the dreary silhouette of his own bleak image.
We rejoice in President Biden’s astute decision to at once captain the ship of state back upon the tide of democracy, but this is just a half-turn of the helm. We enjoin the president to complete this noble recovery by issuing the visas, years ago applied for, and still deliberately held in tremendous backlog – in Syria, Yemen, Somalia, Nigeria, Libya, Iran, Myanmar, Sudan, Chad. Eritrea, Kyrgyzstan, North Korea, Tanzania, and Venezuela – to reunite divided families and salvage humanity within our own shores.
Our own records of state indicate that the ban directly affected more than 88,000 victims. Its third legal iteration, dressed in the fig leaf of national security, promised an exemption process. Yet between December 2017 and April 2020, the previous Administration denied 74% of wavier applications, according to Georgetown University’s The Bridge Initiative academic researchers. Yet the vast majority of applicants have never even reached the accept-or-reject decision stage in the totally unmonitored process, which is precisely the point of how and why it was designed as such.
We, therefore, request you President Biden to make the No Ban Act, previously approved in Congress, a priority for your Administration in your first term, working with both Representatives and Senators to revive the legislation that would prevent future US presidents from unilaterally ordering immigration limits based on inherently discriminatory provisions of religion or ethnicity and that prevents national security from being used as a legal shield.
Asylum and immigration to unify families and loved ones form part of our God-given unalienable rights as human beings, and no nation or society can claim civility or moral enlightenment without cementing into law broad, non-discriminatory provisions for both.
Again, we at US Council for Muslim Organizations and the American Muslim community, thank you for rescinding the benighted Muslim Ban of the preceding Administration. You have our commitment to aid you in striving to unify, better, and bring peace to our nation. Do not hesitate to call on us wherever we may be of help.
We ask God to bless and guide you in your duties and leadership, and to grant the best of His grace, forgiveness, and guidance to this nation.
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