Kristi Noem pushes a ‘full travel ban’ in wake of DC capturing

Homeland Safety Secretary Kristi Noem is seizing on the deadly capturing of a Nationwide Guard member in Washington—utilizing the tragedy to push for a sweeping new journey ban that goes properly past something the administration has floated publicly.

She rolled out the concept Monday night time on X, casting it because the product of a dialog she’d simply had with President Donald Trump.

“I am recommending a full travel ban on every damn country that’s been flooding our nation with killers, leeches, and entitlement junkies,” she wrote. “Our forefathers built this nation on blood, sweat, and the unyielding love of freedom—not for foreign invaders to slaughter our heroes, suck dry our hard-earned tax dollars, or snatch the benefits owed to AMERICANS. WE DON’T WANT THEM. NOT ONE.”

“Real American” by David Horsey

The submit gestures again to Trump’s first-term journey ban—a bruising authorized saga that started with a chaotic rollout concentrating on seven Muslim-majority nations and ended, after a number of rewrites, with a Supreme Court docket seal of approval in 2018. The bans had been for Muslim-majority nations Iran, Syria, Yemen, Libya and Somalia—and added a ban on vacationers from North Korea and authorities officers from Venezuela.

What Noem didn’t provide this time was any roadmap. She didn’t identify the nations she desires blocked or clarify the standards for selecting them. A DHS spokesperson didn’t instantly reply to Every day Kos’ request for remark.

It’s additionally unclear what, precisely, Trump has signed off on. He reposted Noem’s message on Fact Social throughout a sprawling late-night posting binge—greater than 150 posts in a number of hours—with out including an evidence of his personal.

Noem’s language, casting immigrants as “foreign invaders,” lands at a second when the White Home is tightening authorized pathways within the wake of final week’s killing. Authorities say the gunman, Rahmanullah Lakanwal, is an Afghan nationwide who arrived in 2021 as a part of the Biden-era resettlement effort and was granted asylum earlier this 12 months underneath the Trump administration. Afghanistan is already among the many 12 nations barred underneath the journey ban Trump issued in June.

Trump, for his half, has solely sharpened his rhetoric because the killing. On Thanksgiving, he promised to “permanently pause migration from all third-world countries” and floated one thing he referred to as “reverse migration”—a phrase that appeared to endorse stripping citizenship from overseas nationals and deporting these he deems “non-compatible with Western Civilization.”

By Sunday, he was telling reporters he meant to halt asylum claims “for a long time” as a result of “we don’t want those people.”

White Home press secretary Karoline Leavitt

“Several months ago, he announced a travel ban on 19 third-world and failed state countries around the world,” she stated. “Secretary Noem announced tonight she is recommending that travel ban widen and cover more countries around the globe.”

“Coming to the United States of America is a privilege, it is not a right,” Leavitt added. “If you abuse that privilege, and if you don’t align with the values of the United States, and you don’t respect our country, our culture, our laws, and our people, you are not welcome here.”

The administration additionally launched a evaluation of “all asylum cases approved under the Biden administration,” although DHS hasn’t clarified whether or not the sweep is restricted to Afghan circumstances or applies to circumstances throughout nationalities.

The coverage panorama right here is already large. Trump’s June journey ban already blocks entry from 12 nations—most in Africa and the Center East—and imposes partial restrictions on seven extra. Immigrant-rights teams have filed a thicket of lawsuits. 

And the reminiscence of the 2017 ban nonetheless hangs over the controversy: the airport chaos and subsequent detentions, the rapid-fire injunctions, and the eventual Supreme Court docket sign-off on a closely revised textual content.

Seen via that historical past, Noem’s latest push isn’t precisely a shock. It’s a well-recognized sample in Trump-era governing: tragedy as catalyst, disaster as justification, and a sweeping coverage response that reaches far previous the details of the case and into the administration’s longest-held ambitions.