Some United States federal legislators led by Speaker Nancy Pelosi including civil right groups and immigrant communities to protest and challenge last week’s expansion of President Donald Trump’s addition of Nigeria and five other countries on the visa restriction list.
On Friday, US announced it would restrict the ability of immigrants from Nigeria, Myanmar, Eritrea, Kyrgyzstan, Sudan and Tanzania to get certain immigration visas by February 22, 2020.
Pelosi said the expansion was an “outrageous, un-American travel ban which “threatens our security, our values and the rule of law.
“The sweeping rule, barring more than 350 million individuals from predominantly African nations from travelling to the United States, is discrimination disguised as policy,” Pelosi said in a statement.
“With this latest callous decision, the President has doubled down on his cruelty and further undermined our global leadership, our Constitution and our proud heritage as a nation of immigrants,” she added.
Pelosi said Democrats would oppose the new policy in court and introduce the NO BAN Act to “prohibit religious discrimination in our immigration system and limit the President’s ability to impose such biased and bigoted restrictions.”
“In the Congress and in the Courts, House Democrats will continue to oppose the Administration’s dangerous anti-immigrant agenda,” she said. “We will never allow hatred or bigotry to define our nation or destroy our values.”
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And although US Supreme Court has upheld Trump’s ban on travellers from several predominantly Muslim countries in 2018, appearing to shut down legal challenges that claimed the policy was rooted in anti-Muslim bias, a federal appeals court in Richmond will tomorrow (Tuesday) hear arguments from civil rights groups hoping to keep the challenges alive.
The 4th US Circuit Court of Appeals will hear arguments in three lawsuits filed by US citizens and permanent residents whose relatives have been unable to enter the US because of the travel ban, which was first imposed shortly after Trump took office in January 2017.
The court is being asked to decide whether a federal judge in Maryland made a mistake when he refused to dismiss constitutional claims made in a lawsuit filed by the International Refugee Assistance Project despite a 2018 US Supreme Court ruling in a Hawaii case that found the travel ban “a legitimate grounding in national security concerns.”
There is a current panic among immigrant communities in the US with many afraid that the restrictions will prevent them from uniting with their loved ones from the countries affected.
A Houston immigration lawyer Ral Obioha said her phone was ringing off the hook by Friday, with several of her clients asking a seemingly simple, straightforward question: “How does this affect me?”
“It really hits us hard right now,” said Obioha, who was born in the US to parents from Nigeria was quoted as saying.
Co-director of the UndocuBlack Network, Patrice S Lawrence, which advocates for the rights of undocumented black people in the US lamented “the reasons keep changing about why it is that the Trump administration wants to keep Black and brown people out. And that’s because there is no honest reason, except for racism and xenophobia.
“Behind these bans and visa sanctions are real people with real families – facing the pain and uncertainty that family separation brings,” Lawrence said in a statement.
Nonetheless, White House press secretary Stephanie Grisham defended the existing policy Friday in a statement announcing the new restrictions.
“President Trump’s security and travel proclamations have immeasurably improved our national security, substantially raised the global standard for information-sharing, and dramatically strengthened the integrity of the United States’ immigration system,” she said. “The orders have been a tremendous and vital success.”
The 2020 meeting of Nigeria- United States Binational Commission will open in Washington D.C. this morning with several Nigerian ministers and senior government officials attending the three-day event.
According to a statement posted on the website of the US Embassy in Nigeria, the delegations will discuss areas of strategic collaboration toward measurable progress, particularly in the areas of trade and investment, development, good governance, and security cooperation.
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