Well that didn’t take long. Less than a day after signing a targeted entry ban for citizens in seven countries prone to hosting terrorist organizations, immigration lawyers sued to block the order. Funded by numerous immigration organizations and – of course — the ACLU, this legal challenge seeks to cast the refugees and immigrants as victims who are being denied their rights.
Always eager to turn security issues into human rights abuses, these organizations are holding up two men as examples of the injustice that President Trump’s order has wrought.
One, an Iraqi citizen, worked for the Army for years as an interpreter and was denied entry on Friday into the United States. The second man is also from Iraq and was similarly denied entry at JFK. His wife is Iraqi as well — she worked as a US contractor in her country but now lives in exile in the United States. Both men are used as poster children for the left. Big, bad Trump is beating up on decent, innocent people unjustly being stripped of their rights.
Naturally, this is a classic leftist view which fails to see the forest from the trees. No one’s constitutional rights were violated on Friday. Why? Because only American citizens enjoy the rights outlined in the U. S. Constitution.
The idea that there are fundamental human rights regardless of nationality is a laudable concept and one worth protecting. The United States even extends many constitutional rights to people within its borders illegally. But immigration and entry are different animals altogether. Only in the fantasies of the progressive globalist class do these liberties extend all the way to the right to enter a country that is not your home.
How the left can be obsessed with taking away the constitutional rights of law abiding citizens while protesting limits on non-citizen entry is astounding. In the wake of the Orlando shooting, many of the same people bemoaning the temporary ban on entry were advocating a ban on gun purchases for citizens whose names were on any one of several secret government lists. These lists are notorious for erroneously including people (just ask the media’s latest celebrity crush Representative John Lewis).
Nonetheless the left would have us believe that limiting the rights of law-abiding citizens is worth it if it prevents a small number of suspected terrorists from purchasing a firearm. It is truly puzzling then that they refuse to get behind an order which merely limits the privileges of law-abiding non-citizens in order to prevent suspected terrorists from crossing our borders.
The President applied this ban only to seven countries for ninety days. A little perspective is in order.
