‘We live in frightening times’: NYers react to President Trump’s new travel ban

“Cruel.”

“Very confused.”

“Frightening times.”

Those are just some of the reactions from members of New York’s immigrant communities following the announcement of President Donald Trump’s new travel ban.

The restrictions, announced Wednesday, are set to take effect Monday and will most directly affect citizens traveling from 12 countries: Haiti, Iran, Yemen, Afghanistan, Myanmar, Equatorial Guinea, Eritrea, Chad, the Republic of Congo, Sudan, Somalia and Libya, according to the White House’s list.

Citizens of those countries will largely be forbidden from entering the United States, with some exceptions. Additionally, citizens of seven other countries, including Venezuela and Cuba, will be denied student or tourist visas and forbidden from securing permanent U.S. residence.

Trump said the ban was needed for national security reasons, stating in a video that “nothing will stop us from keeping America safe.”

The city’s Haitian community, which numbers nearly 117,000 people according to 2020 census estimates, is by far the largest immigration population to be affected by the travel ban, followed by the Yemeni, Iranian and Afghan communities, which each number below 20,000.

Murad Awawdeh, the  president and CEO of the New York Immigration Coalition, said the latest measure amounted to “the racist exclusion of certain people.”

“ It's not only cruel, it's a calculated assault on immigrants and our communities who continue to be scapegoated by this administration,” Awawdeh said. “This ban is designed to spread fear and division in our communities.”

Immigrant rights activists said the measure brought to mind the battle fought over a similar travel ban, announced when Trump first took office in 2017. Courts initially blocked the measure, which barred immigrants from five predominantly Muslim countries as well as Venezuela and North Korea.

However, the Supreme Court in 2018 ruled 5-4 that the restrictions were constitutional. Legal experts said they expected the latest measure to be upheld as well, citing the wide latitude granted to the executive branch to determine immigration policy.

Awawdeh said his organization was prepared to fight the travel ban, as it had at the beginning of the first Trump administration. At the time, thousands of New Yorkers took to the streets of Lower Manhattan in protest and turned up at JFK Airport.

Rana Abdelhamid, the executive director of Malikah, a Queens-based antiviolence group that serves North African New Yorkers, said many members of the community had been bracing for a travel ban and had canceled trips abroad out of fear that they wouldn’t be allowed to return.

“ So have been dealing with extended family separation and not being able to like connect with their loved ones,” Abdelhamid said, adding that she worked with asylum-seekers from two of the countries on the list, Sudan and Chad, who had applied for asylum and are now “very confused” what their status is, in the wake of the ban.

Debbie Almontaser, the co-founder of the Yemeni American Merchants Association, said the travel ban was “clearly rooted in a desire to exclude Muslims and countless other Black and brown communities.”

In the immediate wake of the announcement, Almontaser said many in the community asked her what the implications of the ban were for their relatives living abroad.

“‘Does this mean that their visa is canceled? Does this mean they can no longer come?’” were among questions she described hearing.

“I had to say to them that this ban is going to take effect on Monday at 12:01 a.m.,” she said. “They need to get their family on a plane as soon as possible and pray that they will be allowed to enter JFK. But if they fly after Monday 12:01 a.m., they are not going to be permitted.”

“We live in frightening times,” she said.

Stephen Yale-Loehr, a retired professor of immigration law practice at Cornell Law School, said the travel ban had many “carveouts.” He said international athletes would be allowed into the country, and permanent residents and foreign citizens who are already in the country “don’t have to worry about this.”

"For other individuals from those countries, they will likely not be able to enter the United States," he said.

Yale-Loehr said that although legal challenges were to be expected, the travel ban was likely to upheld by courts.

“ The Supreme Court held that all presidents have wide discretion when it comes to immigration because it deals with foreign affairs, particularly when that immigration effort deals with national security,” Yale-Loehr said, adding that “you're using a sledgehammer rather than a scalpel to say that every person from a particular country is a national security risk.”

Muzaffar Chishti, a senior fellow at the Migration Policy Institute, said he expected the travel ban to “pass legal muster,” in part because it involved multiple factors in order to determine whether a country should be on the list.

Chishti said this likely allowed it to overcome charges that it was motivated solely by “religious animus,” as was the case in the earlier iterations of the travel ban during the first Trump administration.

““They clearly have learned a lot from the litigation last time,” Chishti said.

The ban was announced with an executive order, which stated that “these protocols enhance our ability to detect foreign nationals who may commit, aid, or support acts of terrorism, or otherwise pose a safety threat, and they aid our efforts to prevent such individuals from entering the United States.”

The order maintained that countries on the list were chosen for a variety of reasons, including their “screening and vetting capabilities,” information sharing policies, “whether each country has a significant terrorist presence within its territory” and visa-overstay rates.

In a video announcement of the travel ban, Trump cited individuals who had overstayed their visas, saying, “We don’t want ‘em.”

Elsie Saint Louis, the  executive director of Haitian Americans United for Progress, rejected language in the executive order that claimed “hundreds of thousands of illegal Haitian aliens flooded into the United States during the Biden administration.”

“ They were invited. There was a parole program. That parole program was legal. These people were legally admitted," she said. "So all of a sudden labeling in this way is unjust and inhumane.”

She said the ban would result in Haitian New Yorkers being separated from their loved ones in Haiti, and came on the heels of racialized fearmongering, including a falsehood propagated by Trump prior to the 2024 election that Haitian immigrants in Ohio were eating dogs.

“ This travel ban, it's just one more blow to our community,” Saint Louis said.