WASHINGTON — President Donald Trump says his halt to immigration from seven Muslim-majority nations and ban on refugees is being done in the name of national security. But it’s not clear whether these measures will help prevent attacks on American soil, and they could embolden extremists who already view the U.S. as at war with Islam.
The admissions ban announced Friday also does not directly address a more urgent law enforcement concern: homegrown violent extremists already in the United States who plot their attacks without any overseas connections or contacts.
The ascendancy of the Islamic State, and the group’s ability through slick and easily accessible propaganda to reach followers in all corners of the country, has been a more immediate challenge — and a more realistic danger — for Western counterterrorism officials.
The executive order suspends refugee admissions for 120 days and bars all immigration for 90 days from Muslim-majority countries with terrorism concerns: Iran, Iraq, Libya, Somalia, Sudan, Syria and Yemen.
Omar Mateen, the man responsible for the Orlando nightclub shooting, the deadliest terror attack in the U.S. since the Sept. 11 attacks, was born in New York to Afghan parents. Syed Rizwan Farook, who took part in the December 2015 San Bernardino attack, was born in Chicago. His wife, Tashfeen Malik, had been living in Pakistan and visiting family in Saudi Arabia before she passed the background check and entered the U.S.
The brothers who bombed the Boston Marathon were ethnic Chechens who had been living in the U.S.
In general, Islamic extremists have accounted for a minuscule amount of the roughly 240,000 homicides since Sept. 11, 2001, and people with ancestry from the seven nations in the executive order are responsible for a small fraction of arrests and disrupted plots, said Charles Kurzman, a sociology professor at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill who has studied the issue.
“I can only conclude that this is whipping up fear and hostility toward Americans who have family background from these countries,” Kurzman said.