Trump Answers Boulder Attack By Egyptian National With Travel Ban On 19 Countries, None Of Them Egypt

The Filing

WASHINGTON. President Trump signed a proclamation Wednesday barring or restricting entry to the United States by nationals of 19 countries, a measure the administration presented as a necessary response to a firebombing attack in Boulder, Colorado, that had been carried out three days earlier by a man from a country that does not appear anywhere on the list.

The order fully suspends immigrant and nonimmigrant entry for nationals of Afghanistan, Chad, the Republic of the Congo, Equatorial Guinea, Eritrea, Haiti, Iran, Libya, Myanmar, Somalia, Sudan, and Yemen, and imposes partial restrictions on travelers from Burundi, Cuba, Laos, Sierra Leone, Togo, Turkmenistan, and Venezuela. The attack the President cited as justification was committed by Mohamed Sabry Soliman, a 45-year-old Egyptian national who had remained in the country after his tourist visa expired. Egypt is not among the nineteen.

Asked to explain the omission of the one country with a demonstrated connection to the event he had just invoked, the President cited the strength of the bilateral relationship. "Egypt has been a country that we deal with very closely," he said. "They have things under control." Administration officials noted that the proclamation grew out of a January executive order directing federal agencies to assemble a roster of nations whose nationals should be excluded, a process they described as rigorous, evidence-based, and entirely separate from the question of where any given attacker happened to come from.

The restrictions, officials emphasized, rested on findings about visa-overstay rates and information-sharing deficiencies rather than on the nationality of the Boulder suspect, whose own country exhibited an overstay rate so concerning that the President personally vouched for it. As with the travel ban issued in the opening week of his first term, the new list contained no nation with which the United States maintained the sort of close commercial or diplomatic ties the President was known to prize, an outcome the administration characterized as a coincidence of the data.

The proclamation takes effect June 9, stranding an estimated several thousand approved visa holders, separating families mid-process, and halting the arrival of students and refugees who had completed years of vetting. Officials described the measure as a protective one, noting that the surest way to prevent an attack by a foreign national is to admit fewer foreign nationals, with the necessary exception of those from countries the President likes.

At press time, the administration confirmed that the citizens of the one country whose national had actually prompted the ban remained free to board their flights as scheduled.

Who Benefits

§Donald J. Trump, who revived his signature first-term travel ban in a redrafted, court-tested form and delivered on a central campaign promise while presenting himself as decisive in the wake of an attack.
§Stephen Miller and the architects of restrictionist immigration policy, who moved a long-sought expansion of nationality-based exclusion from white paper into a signed proclamation.
§The administration's nativist political branding, served by a sweeping action that equates national origin with national-security risk.
§The government of Egypt, whose national carried out the very attack the President cited, yet whose citizens remain free to travel to the United States on the strength of ties the President called close.
§The conservative legal movement, handed a ban carefully rewritten to survive the judicial review that struck down earlier versions, resting on the precedent of Trump v. Hawaii.
§DHS and State Department leadership, granted broad discretion over which countries appear on the list and which travelers may obtain waivers.
§Future presidents of either party, who inherit a judicially blessed power to bar entire nationalities from the country by proclamation.

Sourced to the public record · presented without editorial embellishment