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Sit-ins at airports, 'stand-ups' at White House as Trump and Bannon rewrite rules

Paul McGeough

Washington: Funny people, these Americans - there was no mistaking during the election campaign that given his druthers, Donald Trump would go after Muslim refugees and migrants, and yet just a little more than half of eligible voters could be bothered going to the polls.

Now Trump is doing what he said he would do and people have taken to the streets.

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Trump fires acting US Attorney-General

Donald Trump fires acting US Attorney-General Sally Yates after she instructed Justice Department lawyers not to defend the president's order after concluding they did not comply with US law.

In the 48 hours after Trump's explosive executive order, more than 350,000 people donated a total of $US24 million to the American Civil Liberties Union, six times more than the best year it has had with online fund-raising.

Weird government, this Trump administration - in a city of think tanks, with thousands of experts, and with the massive machinery of the US government on call, it seems that no expert advice and little official opinion was sought in formulating the executive order closing US borders to refugees and others from seven majority-Muslim countries, for periods of several months that may well be extended.

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Barack Obama was often criticised for work-shopping issues to death, but it's as if his successor tosses off executive orders at what corporate America calls "stand-ups" - meetings that are so brief that the participants don't get to sit down.

The administration claims it had help from "several of the top immigration staff on Capitol Hill"; that advisers had contacted the departments of State and Homeland Security; that some government agencies had reviewed Trump's executive order; and that the Justice Department's Office of Legal Counsel had approved it. "Everyone who needed to know was informed," an administration official told The Washington Post.

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But like every administration before it, this one leaks.

Insiders say State was not consulted; and that none of Defence, Justice and Homeland Security got a look-in either – despite the huge implications of the order for all three.

According to the Post, Trump's new Homeland Security Secretary, John Kelly, was airborne, flying from Miami to Washington, when he hooked in to a White House conference call for his first full briefing on an order his department had not been invited to review.

Halfway through, another office-bound participant in the call was stunned by Trump's appearance on a nearby TV. "The President is signing the executive order that we're discussing," the official said.

James Mattis, Trump's new defence secretary, was not consulted during the drafting process and reportedly did not see the final document until just hours before Trump signed it. But his views were known – last year he warned publicly that Trump's proposed ban on Muslim immigration was "causing us great damage right now, and it's sending shock waves through the international system".

Trump's increasingly powerful chief strategist Stephen Bannon reportedly took charge of writing the order during the transition period, and at the White House he controlled a small team that included Trump policy chief Stephen Miller.

Bannon, who held that barring refugees was an important gesture to Trump's diehard supporters, has untrammelled power in the White House. Its extent was revealed in another radical executive order issued by Trump in the weekend – the President downgraded the standing of the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, the highest-ranked military officer in the US, and that of the director of national intelligence in the National Security Council (NSC).

Stripped of their permanent membership of the NSC, they will now be summoned to its meetings only when their specific expertise might be seen to be useful. And in elbowing them aside, Trump named Bannon as a permanent member of the council – the task of which is to consolidate cabinet, military and intelligence input in decision-making and to ensure implementation.

But implementation of the executive order on refugees and migrants has been a mess – in terms of its content and the failed political salesmanship.

One of Trump's stoutest defenders and a member of his transition team, James Carafano, told The New York Times: "If there is a criticism of the administration, and I think there is, I think they have done a rotten job of telling their story. It is not like they did not know they were going to do this.

"To not have a cadre of people out there defending the administration — I mean, really guys, they should have done this."

A measure of the uncertainty about the order's limits and scope is the speed with which four different US courts put aspects of the order on hold – and the promises of civil rights groups and attorneys-general in Democrat-controlled states to take the legal fight all the way to the Supreme Court.

More cases are being filed in the courts and lawyers say that as many as 50 to 60 green card holders who were detained at Dulles International Airport, near Washington, on the weekend may have been tricked into giving up their resident status.

Court documents filed on behalf of Yemeni brothers Tareq Aqel Mohammed Aziz and Ammar Aqel Mohammed Aziz tell an alarming tale.

They had been granted immigrant visas because their father, who lives in Flint, Michigan, is a US citizen. But on landing at Dulles on Saturday, they were handcuffed and their immigration paperwork was seized, according to the filings.

They were presented with documents and told that if they did not sign them they would be removed from the US and barred from returning for five years. They were not allowed to get legal advice.

The court papers say that they succumbed to the pressure, signing documents they did not understand – but the effect of which was to surrender their visas, which immigration agents then stamped as "cancelled".

The brothers were then forced to to buy tickets, at their own expense, for a flight back to Ethiopia – where their passports were confiscated on arrival, the filed papers say.

Their lawyers are demanding the return of the visas, for the forms they signed to be invalidated and for them to be returned to the US.

Another spanner was thrown in the Trump works on Monday, when acting Attorney-General Sally Yates, a holdover from the Obama administration, ordered Justice Department lawyers not to defend challenges to the Trump immigration order, declaring in a memo to staff that she was not convinced the order is lawful.

Insisting on what was "legally defensible" and "consistent with this institution's solemn obligation to always seek justice and stand for what is right", she wrote: "At present, I am not convinced that the defense of the Executive Order is consistent with these responsibilities nor am I convinced that the Executive Order is lawful."

Powerful words, but in a sense Yates is an irritation – on Tuesday, the Senate Judiciary Committee is expected to vote on Trump's preferred attorney-general, Alabama senator Jeff Sessions, and he's expected to be just fine with Trump's executive order.

But Trump wasn't waiting for Sessions. He told Yates: "You're fired!"

Amidst mayhem since Friday's formal signing by Trump, insiders have revealed that despite Homeland Security's key role in implementing the executive order, the department's legal staff got to analyse it only after it was operational.

No one in the administration seemed to know what the deal was on the rights of an estimated half-million green card holders from the countries listed in the order – effectively permanent residents of the US.

Initially, Homeland Security lawyers decided they were not affected – but the White House, which is to say Bannon, overruled them, apparently conceding only that green card holders returning from abroad might be exempted on a case-by-case basis.

A day later, White House chief of staff Reince Priebus went the other way: "As far as green card holders going forward, it doesn't affect them," he told NBC News' Meet the Press.

But the homeland security chief wasn't having that. Seemingly overruling his own departmental lawyers, Kelly was now declaring that the green card holders would be subject to a "case-by-case" review.

Finally, late on Sunday, the homeland security issued an order – green card holders were formally exempted from the order.

And then, this non sequitur from Homeland Security: "No foreign national in a foreign land, without ties to the United States, has any unfettered right to demand entry into the United States or to demand immigration benefits in the United States."

But no one was demanding unfettered rights for anyone – the green card holders had pre-existing rights that finally had been acknowledged; and the previously approved rights of refugees who had been vetted to travel to the US were being trampled, as were the rights of would-be refugee and migrant applicants in US law as it had stood.

In a background briefing on Sunday, a White House official speaking on condition of anonymity charged that the current immigration system was "woefully inadequate ... and we don't want a situation where 20, 30 years from now, it's just like a given thing that on a fairly regular basis that there's domestic terror strikes, that stores are shut up or that airports have explosive devices planted or people are mowed down in the street by cars and automobiles and things of that nature.

"These are the realities that we're living in today.

"Now, I don't want to get into a long debate or to distract from what we're all discussing," he said, "but I think that it's reasonable to say that you have to take a holistic look at applicants and that you could argue that if you admit say 50 people who aren't themselves terrorists but maybe who have sympathetic attitudes toward terrorists or who believe that there's an appropriate place for terrorism, that creates an environment where it's easy to radicalise people and to spread radical views and ideologies and, ultimately, to inculcate terrorism ... You're removing a lot of the networks in which radicalisation can take root and then at that point, again, become multi-generational."

Impassioned, yes, but missing the point that people from the seven countries being punished in Trump's executive order – Syria, Iran, Iraq, Yemen, Sudan, Somalia and Libya – had nothing to do with the terrorist attacks in the US which a parade of administration officials said were the reason for Trump's executive order.

Trump demanded a ban on Muslims in the wake of the San Bernardino massacre in December 2015. He was pushing it again after the Orlando massacre in June 2016. And his executive order cites the September 11 attacks no less than three times.

At a signing ceremony at the Pentagon, Trump argued that "numerous foreign-born individuals have been convicted or implicated in terrorism-related crimes since September 11, 2001" – but the home countries of those extremists are not on his list of seven.

  • September 11 – Saudi Arabia, United Arab Emirates, Lebanon and Egypt

  • Times Square bomb attempt – Pakistan

  • Plot to bomb the New York subway system – Pakistan

  • Killing of four US Marines in Chattanooga, Tennessee – born in Kuwait to Palestinian parents

  • Boston marathon bombing – Russia and Kyrgyzstan

  • Orlando massacre – born in the US to Afghan parents

  • San Bernardino massacre – one born in the US; the other in Pakistan

Even as the White House issued a statement insisting that the executive order did not amount to a religious ban, Trump was tweeting: "Christians in the Middle-East have been executed in large numbers. We cannot allow this horror to continue!"

And politically, it's impossible for Trump to divorce the order from his unrelenting attacks on Muslims.

The statement in which Trump called for an end to Muslim immigration to the US is still on his campaign website – and precisely how he got from that Point A to the Point B of his executive order was revealed in the weekend by his friend and ally, former New York mayor Rudy Giuliani.

Appearing on Fox News, Giuliani seemed to say that his raw proposal for a ban on Muslims entering the country would have to be dressed up if it was to be acceptable.

Asked at how Trump had arrived at the seven listed countries, Giuliani became expansive. "I'll tell you the whole history of it," he began.

"So when [Trump] first announced it, he said, 'Muslim ban'. He called me up. He said, 'Put a commission together. Show me the right way to do it legally'."

In defending the order Trump and his team have been all but silent on its likely impact the fight against jihadist terror and on relations with regimes across the Middle East – but security experts and analysts are damning.

J.M. Berger, a fellow with the International Centre for Counter-Terrorism at The Hague and IS expert: "The ban is less about national security and more about advancing a worldview based on religious and racial exclusion," he said. "It's not likely to make us safer, and it is far more likely to help our real enemies, [Islamic State] and al-Qaeda. We don't do ourselves any favours when we make their talking points into reality."

Kenneth Pollack, a veteran Iraq analyst at the Brookings Institution: "At bottom, it sends the message that America sees Iraqis as untrustworthy, that they are not our partners. It reinforces Trump's idea of taking their oil; that we don't view them as allies but something much less than that."

Robert Richer, a 35-year CIA veteran and former chief of the agency's Near East division, called the order "a strategic mistake … This was a win for jihadists and other anti-US forces [because] it fuels the belief out there that Americans are anti-Islam. Otherwise, it accomplishes nothing, because the ones we are most concerned about can still get to the United States."

Their collective case is corroborated by jihadist postings online welcoming Trump's executive order as vindication of their claim that the US is at war with Islam.

Rita Katz, founder of the SITE Intelligence Group which monitors jihadist websites, observed: "Jihadists would have to argue to lengths that Obama, Bush and others held anti-Islam agendas and hated the religion — not just radical terrorists. Trump, however, makes that argument a lot easier for them to sell to their followers."

All of which is reason to wonder why, before the weekend intervention of the courts, those detained under Trump's executive order at Dulles International Airport, near Washington, included an Iranian couple in their 80s – one was blind and the other had recently suffered a stroke.

Both had green cards.

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