By Tooba Wasi
Contributing Writer
On January 27, President Donald Trump signed an executive order banning citizens of seven Muslim-majority countries from entering the U.S. for 120 days, sparking protests in several airports and inciting fear and panic among Muslim-Americans across the country. This ban was yet another careless step toward a dangerous and discriminatory new world for minorities like myself in Trump’s America. Sadly, having grown up as the daughter and sister of first-generation Muslim immigrants in post-9/11 America, it wasn’t anything new.
Despite Trump’s insistence that his order is “not a Muslim ban,” his blatantly xenophobic rhetoric serves as undeniable proof that it is exactly that. The states of Washington and Minnesota used these exact terms when they both sued to block the order.
Washington Attorney General Bob Ferguson cited statements like Trump’s campaign promise to enact “a total and complete shutdown of Muslims entering the U.S.” as proof that the order was “motivated by animus and a desire to harm a particular group.” Thankfully, judicial activism prevailed and blocked this poor executive order.
My family’s home country of Pakistan was fortunately left off Trump’s travel ban, but given the arbitrary nature of his first list of countries and his administration’s volatile reactions to world affairs, it could end up on the next. While I was born in America and blessed with a U.S. passport by virtue of my birth, I still had to stand in immigration queues as early as 3 a.m. while my parents and brother went through the naturalization process.
I still had to wait outside their immigration lawyers’ office for hours every time they had to file paperwork in order to try to become citizens themselves. I still have to withstand prejudice and discrimination every time I get “randomly selected” at the airport, and I still have to worry that this recently growing anti-minority sentiment will culminate in something far worse than what has already happened.
Trump’s travel ban is an unconstitutional violation of everything America values. Our country is built on the backs of immigrants and refugees. The Pilgrims fled to America in search of a better life centuries ago, and Mexican immigrants and Syrian refugees are simply attempting to do the same today.
To deny people entry into the U.S. due to their ethnicity is to go against the very foundations upon which our country was founded. To say that Muslims must be prevented from entering America in the interest of safety is to ignore the very existence of Muslim-Americans.
While Trump cited 9/11 as a justification for the travel ban, not a single one of the terrorists involved in the attacks, or any terrorist attack on American soil since then, were from the seven countries included on his travel ban list.
While religious freedom is a fundamental right guaranteed by the U.S. Constitution, Trump’s belief that his ban is necessary to “keep ‘evil’ out of our country” because Muslims pose a threat to Americans unless “thoroughly vetted” are actions of religious persecution. While this is not the last we’ll hear of this administration’s close-minded policies, this is the perfect opportunity to take a stand against them.
The idea of the great American melting pot, a meld of different cultures and heritages, is what made America a dream. Only by embracing and celebrating all Americans, no matter their race, ethnicity, gender, orientation, or anything else, can we actually “make America great again.”
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