Americans United for Separation of Church and State’s President and CEO Rachel Laser issued the following statement in response to President Donald Trump’s latest immigration order restricting travel from more than a dozen countries, many of them predominantly Muslim nations:
“This ban is just the latest version of the cruel Muslim Ban enacted during the last Trump presidency that started with Trump’s call for a ‘total and complete shutdown of Muslims entering the United States.’ The platform of Trump’s Republican Party called for bringing back the ‘travel ban,’ so this continuation of those policies is as unsurprising as it is cruel. It’s part of the white Christian Nationalist playbook to use immigration law to gerrymander America into a white Christian nation.
“One of the great promises of America is that people of all religions and none are welcome here. Americans United we will continue to fight for freedom without favor and equality without exception, both in and out of court.”
“Donald J. Trump is calling for a total and complete shutdown of Muslims entering the United States until our country’s representatives can figure out what is going on,” Trump declared in Dec. 2015. He then tweeted: “That’s right, we need a TRAVEL BAN for certain DANGEROUS countries, not some politically correct term that won’t help us protect our people!”
In the debates, Trump affirmatively answered a question about whether “the Muslim ban still stands,” and said, “It’s called extreme vetting.” He later said, “We’re having problems with the Muslims, and we’re having problems with Muslims coming into the country,” adding later, “They want sharia law.”
A week after taking office in 2017, Trump implemented the first Muslim Ban with an executive order that banned citizens from seven Muslim-majority countries from entering the United States: Iran, Iraq, Libya, Somalia, Sudan, Syria, and Yemen. The order even barred refugees from those countries, but made an exception for religious minorities (i.e., Christians.) In other words, the Muslim Ban banned Muslims, while favoring Christians.
Muslim Ban 1.0 was challenged and blocked by courts repeatedly. The administration rewrote it as Muslim Ban 2.0, “Protecting the Nation from Foreign Terrorist Entry into the United States,” which was also repeatedly challenged in court and blocked by judges.
In September 2017, Trump signed Muslim Ban 3.0, which limited travel from eight countries: Chad, Iran, Libya, North Korea, Somalia, Syria, Venezuela, and Yemen. Americans United was co-counsel in the first new case filed to challenge this third version of Trump’s Muslim Ban. Trump’s inclusion of North Korea and Venezuela was generally recognized as a clumsy attempt to undercut arguments that clear anti-Muslim bigotry motivated the orders. Despite this clear anti-Muslim bias, the favoring of one religion (Christianity) over others, and the church-state problems with dividing people along religious lines, the U.S. Supreme Court upheld this ban.
The 2024 Republican Party platform promised to bring back the Muslim Ban and to use immigration laws and “extreme vetting” against “foreign Christian-hating Communists, Marxists, and Socialists” and “jihadist and jihadist sympathizers” (a term that Trump deploys as an epithet for all Muslims).
“We don’t want them here,” Trump said when announcing the continuation of these first-term policies on June 4, 2025, in tightly scripted remarks. He confessed that this new travel ban is a continuation of those same policies that were motivated by anti-Muslim bias: “In my first term, my powerful travel restrictions were one of our most successful policies.” Trump also noted that he started this latest policy “on my first day back in office.”
Americans United is a religious freedom advocacy organization based in Washington, D.C. Founded in 1947, AU educates Americans about the importance of church-state separation in safeguarding religious freedom.
Liz Hayes
Associate Vice President of Communications
[email protected]
