Protests against President Trump’s ban on travel to the United States from 7 predominately Muslim countries have filled airports from New York to Seattle, Washington.

The ban

President Trump signed an Executive Order telling the State Department to stop issuing any visas to people from Syria and temporarily pause immigration, travel, and refugee processing from six other countries, Iraq, Iran, Yemen, Libya, Somalia and Sudan. His justification for the order is that the immigrants and refugees from those specific countries pose a threat to US citizens.

Entrance tests

One provision of the Exec. Order is a requirement that anyone entering must agree to support the Constitution of the United states. That doesn’t apply just to people wanting to live here but also those who are vacationing, who are returning from vacation, or coming for critical medical care.

To put this in perspective, would the UK require US tourists to swear they support The Queen just to watch the changing of the guards?

Another provision is the requirement that they swear they have not have engaged in any oppression of another person. So if an Iraqi soldier who fought beside US troops had tried to “oppress” ISIS terrorists who wanted to set off a bomb, would they be excluded?

Those may see silly arguments but as Charles Dickens had a character in Oliver Twist say, “The law is an ass” and, without extensive amendments to the trump ban, any or all of those rules could and apparently already have been applied. (Shakespeare put it more succinctly in Henry VI, “'The first thing we do, let's kill all the lawyers.

”) But US lawyers also flocked to airports to offer their free services to detainees.

Who has been detained?

Among those we know about (some people are still detained and many were sent back already) were:

>Parents of a US military veteran,

>A former US Army translator,

>A child who spent his 5th birthday in detention,

>Two Cleveland Clinic doctors who had been vacationing in Iran were detained then released,

And

>One Cleveland Clinic resident who was also vacationing in Iran who was deported before the Federal District Court stayed any such action.

Even people holding Greed Cards showing they had the right to work in the US were initially detained and some were deported, although the Department of homeland Security later ruled that they were exceptions and should be admitted.

The actual order

Among the provisions of the Executive Order are, “

First, the order invokes the 9/11 attack as justification. None of the hijackers came from any of the countries included in the ban.

Second, entrants must not oppose the founding principles of the US. Presumably not including freedom of association, freedom of religion, and overly restrictive Immigration rules, which are in the Declaration of Independence or The Constitution.

Third, the only exceptions in the original Order were for those carrying diplomatic and NATO passports.

Fourth, “The Secretary of State shall suspend the U.S. refugee Admissions Program (USRAP) for 120 days.” As German Chancellor Merkel explained to President Trump, that violates The Geneva Convention.

Fifth, when the US again accepts refugees, “the Secretary of State …. is further directed to make changes, to the extent permitted by law, to prioritize refugee claims made by individuals on the basis of religious-based persecution, provided that the religion of the individual is a minority religion in the individual’s country of nationality. That paragraph is at the core of the claims that this is a Muslim ban because the minority religion in the countries under the ban are mainly Christians. That probably violates The Constitution's establishment of a State religion clause.

Finally, the Executive Order calls for a cut in all immigration from 100,000 refugees to only 50,000, coincidentally, a few more than the number of 37,500 Christian refugees admitted last year. The State Department can probably find an additional 10,000 Christian applicants to fill the full quota.