Tag Archives: Executive Order

Trump signs revised travel ban order, leaves Iraq off

U.S. President Donald Trump delivers his first address to a joint session of Congress from the floor of the House of Representatives iin Washington, U.S.,

U.S. President Donald Trump delivers his first address to a joint session of Congress from the floor of the House of Representatives iin Washington, U.S., February 28, 2017. REUTERS/Jim Lo Scalzo/Pool

By Steve Holland and Julia Edwards Ainsley

WASHINGTON (Reuters) – President Donald Trump signed a revised executive order on Monday banning citizens from six Muslim-majority nations from traveling to the United States but removing Iraq from the list, after his controversial first attempt was blocked in the courts.

The new order, which the White House said Trump had signed, keeps a 90-day ban on travel to the United States by citizens of Iran, Libya, Syria, Somalia, Sudan and Yemen.

White House spokeswoman Sarah Huckabee Sanders said the new order would take effect on March 16. The delay aims to limit the disruption created by the original Jan. 27 order before a U.S. judge suspended it on Feb. 3.

Trump, who first proposed a temporary travel ban on Muslims during his presidential campaign last year, had said his original executive order was a national security measure meant to head off attacks by Islamist militants.

It came only a week after Trump was inaugurated, and it sparked chaos and protests at airports, as well as a wave of criticism from targeted countries, Western allies and some of America’s leading corporations.

“It is the president’s solemn duty to protect the American people,” Secretary of State Rex Tillerson told reporters after Trump signed the new order. “As threats to our security continue to evolve and change, common sense dictates that we continually re-evaluate and reassess the systems we rely upon to protect our country.”

The leader of the minority Democrats in the Senate, Chuck Schumer, said he expected the revised order to have the same uphill battle in the courts as the original version.

“A watered down ban is still a ban,” he said in a statement. “Despite the administration’s changes, this dangerous executive order makes us less safe, not more, it is mean-spirited, and un-American. It must be repealed.”

Trump’s original ban resulted in more than two dozen lawsuits in U.S. courts. Attorney General Bob Ferguson of Washington state, which succeeded in having the previous ban suspended, said he was “carefully reviewing” the new order.

IRAQ’S NEW VETTING

Iraq was taken off the banned list because the Iraqi government has imposed new vetting procedures, such as heightened visa screening and data sharing, and because of its work with the United States in countering Islamic State militants, a senior White House official said.

Defense Secretary Jim Mattis, who along with several other senior Cabinet members had lobbied for Iraq’s removal, was consulted on the new order and the updated version “does reflect his inputs,” Pentagon spokesman Captain Jeff Davis said.

Thousands of Iraqis have fought alongside U.S. troops for years or worked as translators since the U.S.-led invasion in 2003. Many have resettled in the United States after being threatened for working with U.S. troops.

The White House official said the new executive order also ensures that tens of thousands of legal permanent residents in the United States – or green card holders – from the listed countries would not be affected by the travel ban.

The original order barred travelers from the seven nations from entering for 90 days and all refugees for 120 days. Refugees from Syria were to be banned indefinitely but under the new order they are not given separate treatment.

Trump’s first order was seen by opponents as discrimination against Muslims. The White House official said the new order had nothing to do with religion and that the administration would reset the clock on the 90-day travel ban.

But House of Representatives Democratic leader Nancy Pelosi said “the Trump administration’s repackaging has done nothing to change the immoral, unconstitutional and dangerous goals of their Muslim and refugee ban.”

“NO ALLEGED CHAOS”

Trump publicly criticized judges who ruled against him and vowed to fight the case in the Supreme Court, but then decided to draw up a new order with changes aimed at making it easier to defend in the courts.

Refugees who are “in transit” and already have been approved would be able to travel to the United States.

“There’s going to be a very orderly process,” a senior official from the Department of Homeland Security said. “You should not see any chaos so to speak, or alleged chaos at airports. There aren’t going to be folks stopped tonight from coming into the country because of this executive order.”

The FBI is investigating 300 people admitted into the United States as refugees as part of 1,000 counter-terrorism probes involving Islamic State or individuals inspired by the militant group, congressional sources told Reuters on Monday, citing senior administration officials.

An FBI spokeswoman said the agency was consulting its data to confirm the information.

The White House official said U.S. government agencies would determine whether Syria or other nations had made sufficient security improvements to be taken back into the refugee admissions program.

The new order spells out detailed categories of people eligible to enter the United States, such as for business or medical travel, or people with family connections or who support the United States.

“There are a lot of explicit carve-outs for waivers and given on a case-by-case basis,” the official said.

(Additional reporting by Patricia Zengerle, Doina Chiacu, Mica Rosenberg, Tim Ahmann and Idrees Ali; Editing by Bill Trott and Nick Tattersall)

Controversial Dakota pipeline to go ahead after Army approval

north dakota national guard near dakota access pipeline

By Valerie Volcovici and Ernest Scheyder

WASHINGTON/HOUSTON (Reuters) – The U.S. Army will grant the final permit for the controversial Dakota Access oil pipeline after an order from President Donald Trump to expedite the project despite opposition from Native American tribes and climate activists.

In a court filing on Tuesday, the Army said that it would allow the final section of the line to tunnel under North Dakota’s Lake Oahe, part of the Missouri River system. This could enable the $3.8 billion pipeline to begin operation as soon as June.

Energy Transfer Partners <ETP.N> is building the 1,170-mile (1,885 km) line to help move crude from the shale oilfields of North Dakota to Illinois en route to the Gulf of Mexico, where many U.S. refineries are located.

Protests against the project last year drew drew thousands of people to the North Dakota plains including Native American tribes and environmental activists, and protest camps sprung up. The movement attracted high-profile political and celebrity supporters.

The permit was the last bureaucratic hurdle to the pipeline’s completion, and Tuesday’s decision drew praise from supporters of the project and outrage from activists, including promises of a legal challenge from the Standing Rock Sioux tribe.

“It’s great to see this new administration following through on their promises and letting projects go forward to the benefit of American consumers and workers,” said John Stoody, spokesman for the Association of Oil Pipe Lines.

The Standing Rock Sioux, which contends the pipeline would desecrate sacred sites and potentially pollute its water source,

vowed to shut pipeline operations down if construction is completed, without elaborating how it would do so. The tribe called on its supporters to protest in Washington on March 10 rather than return to North Dakota.

“As Native peoples, we have been knocked down again, but we will get back up,” the tribe said in the statement. “We will rise above the greed and corruption that has plagued our peoples since first contact. We call on the Native Nations of the United States to stand together, unite and fight back.”

Former President Barack Obama’s administration last year delayed completion of the pipeline pending a review of tribal concerns and in December ordered an environmental study.

Less than two weeks after Trump ordered a review of the permit request, the Army said in a filing in District Court in Washington D.C. it would cancel that study. The final permit, known as an easement, could come in as little as a day, according to the filing.

There was no need for the environmental study as there was already enough information on the potential impact of the pipeline to grant the permit, Robert Speer, acting secretary of the U.S. Army, said in a statement.

Trump issued an order on Jan. 24 to expedite both the Dakota Access Pipeline and to revive another controversial multibillion dollar oil artery: Keystone XL. Obama’s administration blocked that project in 2015.

At the Dakota Access construction site, law enforcement and protesters clashed violently on several occasions throughout the fall. More than 600 people were arrested, and police were criticized for using water cannons in 25-degree Fahrenheit (minus 4-degree Celsius) weather against activists in late November.

“The granting of an easement, without any environmental review or tribal consultation, is not the end of this fight,” said Tom Goldtooth, executive director of the Indigenous Environmental Network, one of the primary groups protesting the line.

“It is the new beginning. Expect mass resistance far beyond what Trump has seen so far.”

LEGAL CHALLENGE TOUGH

Any legal challenge is likely to be a difficult one for pipeline opponents as presidential authority to grant such permits is generally accepted in the courts. The tribe said in a statement the decision “wrongfully terminated” environmental study of the project.

Deborah Sivas, professor of environmental law at Stanford and director of Stanford’s Environmental Law Clinic, said a challenge by the tribe would likely rely on the reasons the Army Corps itself gave for why more review was needed in December.

“The tribe will probably argue that an abrupt reversal without a sufficient explanation for why the additional analysis is not necessary is arbitrary and should, therefore, be set aside,” she said in an email.

Supporters say the pipeline is safer than rail or trucks to transport the oil.

Shares of Energy Transfer Partners finished up 20 cents at $39.20, reversing earlier losses on the news.

(Additional reporting by Liz Hampton in HOUSTON and Brendan Pierson in New York; Writing by David Gaffen and Simon Webb; Editing by Cynthia Osterman)

U.S. moves to resume admitting refugees, including Syrians

displaced Syrian boy

By Julia Edwards Ainsley

WASHINGTON (Reuters) – The U.S. State Department on Saturday moved to begin admitting refugees, including Syrians, as soon as Monday after a federal judge on Friday blocked a Trump administration temporary ban on refugee admissions.An email from the State Department’s refugee office reviewed by Reuters Saturday said the U.S. government is working with its legal team and interagency and overseas partners to comply with the ruling.

Trump’s Jan. 27 executive order had suspended refugee admissions for 120 days and indefinitely barred Syrian refugees but U.S. Judge James Robart in Seattle on Friday blocked the president’s order.

A U.S. State Department official told Reuters on Saturday that officials “expect some refugees to arrive Monday.”

The U.S. instructed the International Organization for Migration “to rebook refugees of all nationalities, including Syrians, who were” to schedule to arrive since the Trump’s order was signed, the email said.

“We are focusing on booking refugee travel through February 17. We are asking that arrivals resume this Monday, the first normal travel day of the week, if possible. We are aware that some refugees may not be ready to depart on short notice,” the email said.

A United Nations spokesman, Leonard Doyle, told the New York Times about 2,000 refugees were ready to travel.

Refugees do not usually enter on weekends, a U.S. official said, as the department hews to a strict set of rules on how their admissions are processed.

Other travelers from seven Muslim majority countries affected by President Donald Trump’s week-old curb on immigration can rework their flights after the judge’s order, as long as they have valid visas.

Refugees fleeing war, hunger and persecution have less autonomy. Advocates working on their behalf urged the government to move quickly on admitting them.

International Refugee Assistance Project Director Becca Heller called for “the instant resumption of the U.S. Refugee Admissions Program to immediately take the most vulnerable refugees out of harm’s way.”

During the week of the ban, the government admitted 843 refugees – but no Syrian refugees, government figures show. Officials previously told Reuters that they were “in transit” and had already been cleared for resettlement before the ban took effect.

For refugee families, they are trying to keep expectations in check and hope they do not end up back where they started.

Ayham Oubeid, a Syrian living in Cleveland, has been waiting for over a year for his brother George’s family to come to the United States as refugees. His brother, who has health issues, is living in Dubai on a work visa that covers him, his six-year-old daughter and five-months pregnant wife.

George left his job and moved the family out of their apartment when he was told they would be resettled in the United States on Feb. 13. But the family’s plane tickets were canceled when Trump announced the temporary ban. Without George’s job, the family could lose the work visa and be sent back to Syria in the midst of its deadly civil war.

Upon hearing of the judge’s ruling from Friday, Oubeid called George. He was careful not to be too hopeful, knowing the judge’s order could be overturned.

“I don’t want to get excited. I don’t want my brother to get excited. Because it was hard for him when he lost everything and was told he couldn’t come,” Oubeid said.

(Reporting by Julia Edwards and David Shepardson in Washington, Alex Dobuzinskis in Los Angeles; Editing by Mary Milliken, Dan Grebler and Diane Craft)

Trump expected to sign cyber security executive order Tuesday: source

President Donald Trump signing executive orders

By Dustin Volz and Steve Holland

WASHINGTON (Reuters) – President Donald Trump is expected to sign an executive order on cyber security on Tuesday, two sources familiar with the situation said, marking the first action to address what he has called a top priority of his administration.

The order is expected to commission several different reviews of the government’s offensive and defensive cyber capabilities, according to one of the sources and a third briefed on a draft of the order that circulated last week.

The move follows a presidential campaign that was dominated by running storylines related to cyber security, including the hacking and subsequent leaking of Democratic emails as part of what U.S. intelligence agencies determined was a wide-ranging influence operation intended to help Trump win the White House and denigrate his challenger, Democrat Hillary Clinton.

For months Trump refused to accept the conclusions of the agencies that Russia was responsible, before stating at a press conference on January 11 that, “as far as hacking I think it was Russia.”

In his answer, Trump, then the president-elect, pivoted to say that “we also get hacked by other countries, and other people” while vowing to launch a government-wide review of vulnerabilities to cyber attacks.

The order is expected to also initiate a audit of several federal agencies’ cyber capabilities, seek input on how to improve protections for critical infrastructure, and review government efforts to attract and train a technically sophisticated workforce, according to two of the sources briefed on the draft, which was first published by the Washington Post.

The draft order would also seek ways to give the private sector incentives to adopt strong security measures.

(Reporting by Steve Holland and Dustin Volz; Editing by Chris Reese and Grant McCool)

Supreme Court to decide major case on Obama immigration plan

WASHINGTON (Reuters) – The U.S. Supreme Court on Tuesday paved the way for a major ruling on the limits of presidential powers, agreeing to decide the legality of President Barack Obama’s unilateral action to shield more than 4 million illegal immigrants from deportation.

The court agreed to hear Obama’s bid to resurrect his plan, undertaken in 2014 through executive action bypassing the Republican-led Congress, that was blocked last year by lower courts after Texas and 25 other Republican-governed states sued to stop it. A ruling is due by the end of June.

The case is not the first time Obama has asked the Supreme Court to rescue a major initiative. The court in 2012 and 2015 rejected conservative challenges to his signature healthcare law.

The White House expressed confidence the court would now deem as lawful Obama’s immigration action, which was crafted to let millions of illegal immigrants whose children are American citizens or lawful permanent residents to get into a program that protects them from deportation and supplies work permits.

Texas and the other states contend Obama exceeded his presidential powers and usurped the authority of Congress. Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton, a Republican, said courts have long recognized the limits to presidential authority.

“The court should affirm what President Obama said himself on more than 20 occasions: that he cannot unilaterally rewrite congressional laws and circumvent the people’s representatives,” Paxton said.

The nine justices will review a November ruling by the New Orleans-based 5th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals that upheld a February 2015 decision by U.S. District Judge Andrew Hanen in Brownsville, a city along the Texas border with Mexico, to halt Obama’s action.

With some of his major legislative initiatives suffocated by Republican lawmakers, the Democratic president has resorted to executive action to get around Congress on issues including immigration, gun control and the Obamacare law. The most recent executive action came this month when he acted unilaterally to expand background checks for certain gun purchases.

His executive actions have antagonized Republicans who accuse him of unlawfully taking actions by executive fiat that only Congress can perform.

The case raises several legal issues, including whether states have legal standing to sue the U.S. government over decisions on how to enforce federal laws.

‘FAITHFULLY EXECUTED’

The high court added a separate question on whether the president’s action violated a provision of the U.S. Constitution that requires the president to “take care that the laws be faithfully executed.”

The Obama administration called the president’s action mere guidance to immigration officials on how to exercise discretion given by Congress on how to enforce immigration laws.

Obama’s action was “consistent with the actions taken by presidents of both parties, the laws passed by Congress and the decisions of the Supreme Court,” White House spokeswoman Brandi Hoffine said.

Those eligible for Obama’s program, directed at illegal immigrants with no criminal record, would be able to work legally and receive some federal benefits. States were not required to provide any benefits. His order expanded on a 2012 program that provided similar relief for people who became illegal immigrants as children.

The case could have repercussions beyond immigration because it would set a precedent for the circumstances under which states can sue the federal government over a range of executive actions. Future presidents, Republican or Democratic, could face new constraints if the states win.

The case is one of the most important the Supreme Court will decide during its current term, along with a challenge to a restrictive Texas abortion law.

If the court sides with Obama, he would have until his term ends in January 2017 to implement the immigration plan. With the U.S. presidential election looming in November, it would be up to the next president to decide whether to keep it in place.

Obama’s action came after a bipartisan immigration policy overhaul bill passed by the Senate died in the House of Representatives.

The immigration issue has driven a wedge between Hispanics, an increasingly important voting bloc, and Republicans, many of whom have offered tough words about illegal immigrants. Most of the estimated 11 million illegal immigrants are Hispanics, coming from Mexico and other Latin American countries.

The ruling is due just months before the presidential election. The two leading Democratic presidential hopefuls, Hillary Clinton and Bernie Sanders, said on Tuesday the court should uphold Obama’s action. Republican candidates Ted Cruz and Marco Rubio said as president they would undo Obama’s immigration moves.

Senate Democratic Leader Harry Reid said Obama’s executive action relied on well-established constitutional authority.

He said he recently met with the illegal immigrant parents of U.S citizens and lawful permanent residents, saying that “these law-abiding men and women continue to live in constant fear of being separated from their children. These families must be allowed to step out of the shadows and fully contribute to the country that they love and call home.”

(Reporting by Lawrence Hurley; Additional reporting by Roberta Rampton, Richard Cowan and Julia Edwards; Editing by Will Dunham)