- Trump called for Biden to reinstate the travel ban to keep the US safe from radical Islamic terrorists.
- Biden revoked Trump’s travel ban, which primarily affected predominantly Muslim countries, on his first day in office.
- Trump did not name the countries he thought should be subject to the travel ban.
- See more stories on Insider’s business page.
Former President Donald Trump is calling on Biden to reinstate his travel ban to keep the US safe from “radical Islamic terrorism.”
In a statement released on Monday night, Trump advocated that the controversial policy, which mostly affected those traveling from predominantly Muslim countries, should be put back in place.
“If Joe Biden wants to keep our country safe from radical Islamic terrorism, he should reinstitute the foreign country travel ban and all of the vetting requirements on those seeking admission that go with it, along with the refugee restrictions I successfully put in place,” Trump wrote.
He then added that “terrorists operate all over the world and recruit online.”
“To keep terrorism and extremism out of our country, we need to have smart, commonsense rules in place so we don’t repeat the many immigration mistakes made by Europe, and the USA prior to ‘Trump’,” he wrote.
Trump did not outline in his memo which countries he specifically thought should be banned at this juncture, but most people from Syria, Iran, Yemen, Somalia, Libya, North Korea, and Venezuela were prohibited from traveling to the US in 2017.
The list was broadened in 2020 to include immigrants and those traveling from Myanmar, Eritrea, Kyrgyzstan, Nigeria, Sudan, and Tanzania.
It is not clear what vetting requirements Trump was referring to in the memo released on Monday, but the former president did outline early in his presidency what he called an “extreme vetting” process for immigrants, which included a values test for whether immigrants’ views on gay rights, gender equality and religious freedoms, among other things, aligned with “non-extremist views.”
Biden overturned the travel ban on his first day in office, issuing an executive order to revoke the Trump-era policy.
Insider reported in March that the State Department will now allow those who were earlier denied entry into the US as a result of the travel ban to either re-apply for entry or appeal to have the decision reconsidered.
