Not long before President Donald Trump, in his first term, issued his so-called “travel ban” on 13 countries, Somalia-born Abdul Razak Ali Artan drove a Honda Civic into a crowd of fellow Ohio State University students and got out slashing with a butcher knife, injuring 11.
Campus police shot the young jihadist refugee to death, ending the Nov. 28, 2016 attack.
But this tragedy — and far too many other terrorism cases — would never have happened under Trump’s soon-after installed, falsely named “Muslim travel ban,” which sharply curtailed immigrant and non-immigrant US visas for foreign nationals from Somalia and 12 other nations where international terrorist groups operate.
Two years earlier, US authorities had authorized the Somali, his mother and seven siblings to settle in Ohio on refugee applications from a Pakistan camp.
They’d never have been allowed in at all were it in place.
Trump’s policy attracted so much backlash from virtue-signaling political oppositionists in the Democratic Party (whose publicists came up with the sticky “Muslim ban” label) that presidential candidate Joe Biden campaigned to rescind it and quickly followed through in March 2021 with a “Proclamation on Ending Discriminatory Bans on Entry to The United States.”