DAMON HIGGINS / USA TODAY NETWOR
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.”
But now that Trump plans to resuscitate what he called his “famous Travel Ban” for a second term, Americans deserve to know its common-sense original national security purpose.
And, because times have changed, the incoming administration should consider expanding the original list of problematic countries far beyond the 13 that were last on it — Iran, Libya, Somalia, Sudan, Syria, Yemen, North Korea, Burma, Eritrea, Kyrgyzstan, Nigeria, Sudan and Tanzania.
At its heart, the immigrant visa restrictions were only ever meant to apply to countries of terrorism concern that don’t, won’t, or can’t cooperate with American security-vetting processes.
The countries on the list have gone entirely ungoverned for years and therefore are unable to take an American request for information and intelligence.
A good example is Somalia, which went ungoverned by any “recognized competent civil authority” for 25 years of civil war, to the extent that most citizens born after 1991 have no birth certificates, driver licenses, marriage papers or criminal records.
Armed factions destroyed all the records from before 1991.
In 2018, federal prosecutors charged a Somali refugee couple resettled in Tucson with 11 counts of repeatedly lying on their initial 2013 refugee applications in ungoverned Mogadishu and later again on their permanent legal residency applications in Tucson about everything they entered, to include even their names.
Most notably, though, Mohamed Abdirahman Osman and his wife Zeinab Abdirahman Mohamad never let on that he was an al-Shabaab terrorist fighter, as was his brother and entire extended family.
Nor that he provided aid and $32,000 in support to the brother after the brother coordinated a May 24, 2014, suicide bombing of a Djibouti restaurant and became an international fugitive.
US taxpayers would have been spared the danger and prosecution expense had Trump’s travel ban been in place.
Similarly, Yemen, under US-hating Houthi rebel group rule, is useless in US security vetting.
Consider the case of Gaafar Muhammed Ebrahim Al-Wazer, 25, made legal entry into the United States in 2014: He swore on his visa applications while in front of an American officer in the US embassy that he had no affiliations with the Houthi rebels.
Not long after he settled in Altoona, Pa., did the FBI learn via a tip that Al-Wazer had fought with the rebels and was posting all about it on social media: He allegedly unburdened himself of increasingly fervent hatreds on his Facebook page, where he wished “death to all Americans, especially Jews,” and vowed he would stay on the path of violent jihad.
The Bureau found online photos showing a heavily armed Al-Wazer and his brother with the Houthi rebels in Yemen.
Before Trump left office, his administration showed it was willing to add or subtract countries as changing circumstances required.
For instance, it added Nigeria, Kyrgyzstan, Eritrea, Tanzania and Myanmar for their inability to help the US do security vetting.
Going forward, though, the next Trump administration should consider adding as many countries as necessary.
These might include, for starters, Afghanistan.
During Trump’s first term, the US military was still backing a friendly government that could easily provide security data on Afghans seeking US entry visas.
But no more: The hostile Taliban is in charge there, not eager to help dime out its own, and too many Afghans brought in have proven to be security risks, among them Nasir Ahmad Tawhedi, an Oklahoma City resident who came in as a refugee during the Biden administration and now stands charged with plotting a violent election day attack.
Other nations that should be considered for the list would be the Democratic Republic of Congo (a failed state rife with ISIS-affiliated terrorist groups), Iraq and Tajikistan.
We cannot trust these countries to tell us the truth about the people trying to get into the United States — and Trump is right not to let them in.
Todd Bensman, a senior national security fellow at the Center for Immigration Studies, is the author of “Overrun: How Joe Biden Unleashed the Greatest Border Crisis in U.S. History.”