Muslim ban 2.0
A thinly disguised revival of Trump’s notorious 2017 policy
5 June 2025
Donald Trump’s newly announced travel ban — barring entry to the United States for citizens of twelve countries including Afghanistan, Haiti, and Iran — is a thinly veiled reprise of his notorious 2017 “Muslim ban.” Cloaked this time in the language of visa overstay rates and bureaucratic deficiencies, the ban remains an exercise in nativist scapegoating. Its underlying logic is not national security, but the propagation of fear and the consolidation of white nationalist narratives — especially those associated with the “Counter-Jihad” movement and its apocalyptic vision of Islam as an existential threat to Western civilisation.
In a brief, pre-recorded White House address posted on social media on Wednesday evening, Trump claimed that the ban would “protect Americans from dangerous foreign actors” and declared, with ominous finality, “We will not let what happened in Europe happen in America.” That line — seemingly offhand — is in fact a rhetorical dog-whistle. It evokes the paranoid mythologies of the Great Replacement Theory and the Counter-Jihad movement, both of which depict Muslim immigration to Europe as a form of civilisational sabotage.
While the European wing of the movement tends to emphasize the internal threat that Muslim immigrants allegedly pose to European culture, the American wing emphasises the external threat allegedly posed by “Islamic terrorism.” This difference reflects a shared belief that Europe (or Eurabia, as it is termed in the alarmist language of Bat Ye’or) is the principal battlefield, a warzone where the forces of Islam are already present in significant numbers, while the US forms a distant hinterland, a place where Islam has not yet managed to establish a proper beachhead. The European members of the Counter-Jihad movement are thus continually warning their American counterparts not to “let what has happened in Europe happen to America.”
These movements do not simply argue for stronger borders; they recast immigration itself as a form of demographic warfare, fusing Islamophobia with ethno-nationalist anxiety. In this context, Trump’s new ban appears less as a legitimate security measure than as a symbolic bulwark against an imagined Muslim tidal wave.
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Though this version of the ban avoids exclusively targeting Muslim countries, the fig leaf is transparent. Eight of the twelve countries listed — Afghanistan, Chad, Eritrea, Iran, Libya, Somalia, Sudan and Yemen — are Muslim-majority nations. The inclusion of non-Muslim majority countries like Myanmar, Haiti, the Republic of the Congo and Equatorial Guinea seems less about genuine concern than about plausible deniability. Three of these — Haiti and the two African nations — fit snugly within Trump’s well-documented contempt for what he once called “shithole countries,” suggesting that racial animus is no less a driver of this policy than religious bias. That leaves Myanmar as the only outlier, arguably included as a token gesture to human rights advocates alarmed by the country’s treatment of the Rohingya Muslims.
Haiti has been a favourite target for Trump. During a presidential debate with Kamala Harris in 2024, he claimed that illegal immigrants from Haiti were eating domestic pets in Springfield, a small city in Ohio. During the televised debate, Trump said: “In Springfield, they are eating the dogs. The people that came in, they are eating the cats. They’re eating — they are eating the pets of the people that live there.” City officials later clarified that there had been “no credible reports” that this had actually happened. Nevertheless, the baseless claim spread like wildfire on social media, with JD Vance promoting it on X. Representative Clay Higgins called Haiti the “nastiest country in the western hemisphere” in a post on social media, saying migrants from the Caribbean country, the majority of whom are in the U.S. legally, should “get their ass out of our country. Higgins’ rant on X — which was deleted hours later — came in response to an Associated Press story about a Haitian nonprofit group that had filed a citizen criminal charge against former Trump and Vance for their repeated baseless claims. The rhetoric led to threats of violence in Springfield, including more than 30 bomb threats, forced evacuations of schools and government buildings, and violence against Haitians in the city.
If the new travel ban were truly about terrorism or visa violations, the omissions are as telling as the inclusions. Most striking is the absence of Egypt from the list — despite the fact that Trump explicitly cited the recent attack in Boulder, Colorado, in which an Egyptian national reportedly injured eight people with a flamethrower and Molotov cocktails. Egypt is a major recipient of US military aid and a close ally of Trump’s administration. Its absence from the ban reveals the inconsistency — and therefore the political motivation — behind the entire exercise. It is hard to avoid the conclusion that Trump’s personal alliances and ideological preferences are determining security policy more than any coherent threat assessment.
This is not mere speculation. The ban itself acknowledges that most of the countries listed are not on the US State Department’s list of state sponsors of terrorism. Trump’s administration has justified the inclusion of these countries based on bureaucratic or infrastructural issues — such as difficulty verifying documents or coordinating deportations — not on active threats. In other words, people from these countries are not being banned because they are dangerous, but because their governments are weak or disorganised. This is security theatre — punishing civilians for the failures of their states, and using their exclusion as a campaign talking point.
Indeed, this is one of Trump’s most cynical achievements: to turn human displacement, migration, and asylum into emotive symbols of national decay. He is not securing borders so much as weaponising them. His administration knows from experience that a blatantly discriminatory ban will not survive the courts, so it has repackaged the 2017 Muslim ban in more legally defensible terms. This ban has no time limit, only a vague promise of periodic review. The language is bureaucratic, the rationale more subtle — but the effect is the same: exclusion, fear, and division.
And just as before, the communities most harmed by this policy are not “foreign actors” or “Islamist infiltrators,” but refugees, asylum seekers, and families separated by war and persecution. These are precisely the people most in need of American protection — individuals who may already have relatives in the US, or who have waited years for a chance to rebuild their lives. As Robyn Barnard of Human Rights First put it, this ban “will harm refugees, asylum seekers, and other vulnerable populations, including many who have been waiting to reunite with loved ones in our country.” It does nothing to keep the US safe. It does everything to confirm to the world that Trump’s America is an increasingly inhospitable place for the displaced, the Muslim, the poor, and the black or brown.
This is not a policy based on facts or threats; it is a campaign slogan masquerading as security strategy. It’s a grim echo of the “total and complete shutdown of Muslims entering the United States” that Trump once demanded on the campaign trail in 2015. The slogans may have softened, but the strategy remains the same: stoke fear, tighten borders, blame the outsider.
In the long run, bans like this do not make America safer. They fracture communities, alienate allies, and provide propaganda victories to America’s enemies. More importantly, they corrode the moral authority of a nation that claims to be built on ideals of liberty, equality, and refuge for the oppressed. If we judge a country not by how it treats the powerful but by how it treats the vulnerable, then Trump’s new travel ban is not just misguided — it is a betrayal of what America is supposed to stand for.
