Trump’s Travel Ban: How It Works and Who Is Affected

Almost obscured in the rancor over President Donald Trump’s immigrant crackdown at the southern border is the impact of his travel ban, upheld by the Supreme Court last week.

The presidential order proclaiming the travel ban, which took effect in December after two broader iterations were blocked by lower courts, applies with varying degrees of severity to seven countries — five with Muslim majorities.

Here are the basics of the order, including who is potentially affected the most and what opponents have done since the Supreme Court affirmed its legality in a 5-4 decision.

A: It indefinitely suspends the issuance of immigrant and nonimmigrant visas to applicants from the Muslim-majority countries Libya, Iran, Somalia, Syria and Yemen — plus North Korea and Venezuela.

A: The number of people who fall under the ban exceeds 135 million, according to immigrant advocacy groups. The majority are in the five Muslim-majority nations, led by Iran, with a population of more than 80 million.

A: The court’s majority said no, based on the government’s process of granting exceptions and on the inclusion of North Korea and Venezuela in the order.

Critics have said potential travelers to the United States from those two countries are insignificant. In Venezuela’s case, the order applies to only a handful of officials and their families. For North Koreans, it has little practical effect since their government allows few citizens to travel to the United States.

A: The U.S. government says it has a comprehensive system for issuing what are known as waivers to people from the affected countries who need visas. It has described the criteria for waivers in broad terms, based on whether denying entry to an applicant would cause undue hardship, whether the applicant represents a security threat and whether entry would be in the national interest.

The granting of waivers, the order said, is left to the discretion of consular officers responsible for reviewing applications.

Getting a waiver does not itself guarantee entry. A successful applicant for a waiver must still seek a visa.

A: It’s difficult to answer from government databases, but there are indications that only a small fraction of applicants are getting them.

A State Department response to an inquiry by Sen. Chris Van Hollen of Maryland, an outspoken opponent of the ban, provided some insight. On the same day the Supreme Court announced its decision, Van Hollen posted on Twitter the State Department response, which showed that out of 33,176 waiver applications received through April 30, only 579 had been granted, about 2 percent.

A: Based on population, it is Iran. Even though the long-estranged relations between the United States and Iran have worsened under the Trump administration, thousands of Iranians have come to the United States to study.

By some estimates there are as many as 1 million Iranian-Americans, and many have relatives in Iran who may now not be able to emigrate or visit.

A: The order grants exceptions for student visas, but that does not automatically mean students face an easier time. They must go through more extensive background checks and vetting, which could delay their applications for months.

Even if they obtain visas, students can still be stopped and questioned at the border if Customs and Border Protection officers have doubts about whether the purpose of their travel is indeed study.

Still, students with visas who are re-entering the country to return to school should not encounter problems, said Kevin R. Johnson, dean of the School of Law at the University of California, Davis.

There are indications that in Iran’s case, at least, many students who have accepted offers in the United States are looking elsewhere.

“The problem is that with the students knowing that they will never be allowed to work in the U.S., most of them will essentially choose not to come here in the first place,” said Trita Parsi, president of the National Iranian American Council, which strongly opposed the travel ban. “So the loophole for students is essentially nonexisting.”

Jamal Abdi, the council’s vice president, said it was seeing a big drop in Iranian students at American medical residencies and graduate programs. At Stanford University, for example, Abdi said Iranians typically accounted for more than 10 percent of engineering doctoral candidates, but this year Stanford has “zero Iranian students coming in.”

A: Immigrant-rights lawyers are trying to pressure the government to explain how it decides who gets waivers. In a lawsuit filed Thursday, two advocacy groups, the Center for Constitutional Rights in New York and Muslim Advocatesin Washington, demanded that government agencies responsible for the waivers provide detailed information on how they are granted.

The lawsuit said many people had been denied waivers without knowing what information they needed to apply, suggesting the process is “cursory, nonexistent, not left to consular discretion, or so limiting that it can be considered nonexistent.”

“Thousands or millions of people’s lives now depend on this waiver process. It’s become their only hope,” said Diala Shamas, a lawyer at the Center for Constitutional Rights. “It’s quite possible there isn’t a waiver process along the lines of what’s been described to us.”