Trump is reverting to a tactic he used during his 2016 campaign—playing on Americans’ concerns of foreign terror strikes in order to justify stricter immigration restrictions at home—in the wake of Hamas’ fatal attacks on Israel.
On Monday, Trump attempted to draw connections between the ongoing crisis in Israel and Gaza and US border security by promising to revive his controversial travel ban that targeted primarily Muslim nations at a rally in Wolfeboro, New Hampshire. Without providing any evidence, he said that the “same people” responsible for violent acts in Israel were entering the United States through “our totally open southern border,” and he speculated that some of those entering the country were plotting a “attack” on American soil.
The tone of the former president is reminiscent of his 2016 campaign and his first year in office, when he utilised the threat of terror strikes within the country to discourage immigration and refugee resettlement from primarily Muslim countries.
After the December 2015 mass shooting in San Bernardino, California, by individuals believed to have sympathies with ISIS, Trump’s campaign called for a “total and complete shutdown of Muslims entering the United States” during the 2016 election cycle. He also spoke out against the Obama administration’s strategy for countering ISIS when former President Barack Obama proclaimed that the terrorist organisation had been “contained” the day before ISIS claimed credit for a string of coordinated attacks across Paris in November 2015.
After those attacks, Trump stated, “We have leadership who doesn’t know what they’re doing.”
Shortly after taking office in January 2017, Trump signed an executive order for the first travel ban, which temporarily barred entry to the United States for 90 days for nationals of seven mostly Muslim countries: Iraq, Iran, Libya, Somalia, Sudan, Syria, and Yemen.
Protests were held at airports all around the country, and the ban was challenged in court. In 2018, the Supreme Court maintained the ban in its third iteration. Following his inauguration in 2021, President Joe Biden abolished the restriction on foreign travel.
In his inaugural address for his 2024 presidential campaign, Trump promised to reinstate the ban and broaden it to include “communists and Marxists.”
On Monday, Trump said that a travel restriction would protect the United States from terrorist attacks like the ones Hamas carried out in Israel over the weekend.
Even other Republican candidates have made the connection between terrorism and border control, so Trump isn’t the first. During the 2014 midterm elections, Republicans stoked public alarm over potential terrorists entering the United States through the southern border. Trump claimed, without evidence, that there were “unknown Middle Easterners” among the Central American migrants travelling to the United States in the lead-up to the 2018 midterm elections.
This election campaign, Republican candidates have been talking about fentanyl instead of Russia. Some Republican presidential candidates have pledged to use the military to stop drug trafficking at the border and have stated they will investigate China’s role in supplying the chemicals used by drug gangs. Aside from Trump, though, a few other contenders have made similar connections between the attacks in Israel and domestic security.
On Monday, Florida Governor Ron DeSantis warned that terrorists could enter the country over the southern border.
During a campaign rally in Pocahontas, Iowa, he remarked, “You have to recognise that if that can happen in Israel, what do you think can happen in our country with an open border where 7 million people at a minimum have come through illegally?”
Vivek Ramaswamy, a biotech entrepreneur, has also attempted to draw parallels between the US’s border policy with Mexico and Israel’s conflict with Hamas.
“What we read about in the papers is how could this have happened with the intelligence failures and the security that Israel has on its own borders,” Ramaswamy said Sunday in Manchester. And they are vital inquiries that, one hopes, will be resolved in the near future. However, America’s primary introspective thought is “if it can happen there, it can happen here.
In response to the Hamas attacks, most Republican presidential candidates have attacked the Biden administration for its recent prisoner release deal with Iran, which involved the transfer of $6 billion in Iranian blocked cash.
Trump claimed on Monday that the deal was to blame for the present bloodshed in Israel, as well as Iran’s oil revenues and “our country’s perceived weakness with an incompetent and corrupt leader.”
State Department official Antony Blinken’s failure to connect the Hamas attack with the prisoner release deal was called “irresponsible” by South Carolina’s former governor, Nikki Haley.
Sen. Tim Scott (R-SC), the ranking Republican on the Senate Banking Committee, has accused the Biden administration of being “complicit” in the attack and has requested that Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen testify on the $6 billion transfer.
On Tuesday, DeSantis stated that he would introduce a bill in the 2018 Florida legislature session to impose stricter sanctions on Iran and prohibit the conduct of any business with the country.
According to the Biden administration, the money from the prisoner swap went straight to Qatar, and Iran can only use the money for humanitarian needs.
