Sirine Shebaya Discusses Fighting the Many Faces of the Muslim Ban

“There are moments when something so outrageous happens that people from all walks of life think to themselves, ‘I have to do something,’” said Sirine Shebaya ’12, a senior staff attorney for Muslim Advocates. In her talk on April 3 at the Schell Center, Shebaya described one of those moments: January 27, 2017, when President Trump issued an executive order barring citizens from Iraq, Syria, Iran, Libya, Somalia, Sudan, and Yemen from entering the United States for 90 days. After this travel ban was announced, thousands of people turned up at airports around the country to protest. Shebaya was among them. With her newborn baby in tow, she spent the first night after the ban at Washington D.C.’s Dulles International Airport, where she provided legal services to refugees caught in the chaos.

At Yale Law School, Shebaya discussed her work defending the civil rights of Muslim, Arab, and South Asian communities in the United States. She focused her talk on the practices and policies that have threatened Muslims since President Trump took office, beginning with but extending far beyond the travel ban. 

As Shebaya noted, the initial ban was quickly struck down by the courts. Shebaya celebrated the prompt, positive outcome of the activism surrounding this issue. However, she was troubled by the complacency it encouraged among many advocates. “There’s a slightly discouraging and pervasive sense that we won,” she said. In reality, Shebaya pointed out, “There is a Muslim ban that is completely and fully in effect.”

For one thing, the Supreme Court has permitted a revised version of the travel ban to take full effect as legal challenges against it are resolved. These restrictions prevent citizens of eight countries—six of which are predominantly Muslim—from entering the United States indefinitely. Moreover, Shebaya noted, “The ban is just the tip of the iceberg of the policies that the Trump administration is putting into place.”

Extreme vetting of both asylum seekers and immigrants applying for visas, for instance, has amounted to what Shebaya called a “back-door Muslim ban.” Both groups are subjected to “incredibly intrusive and extensive questioning,” she said. Often, individuals are asked to give the names of every single family member, their travel dates for the last five years, or even their social media handles and passwords. Shebaya warned that extracting such information without any guarantee of privacy could put people at risk in their home countries. She also pointed out how easy it is for people trying to enter the U.S. to forget a detail or make a small mistake—actions that could lead to being accused of fraud or denied benefits indefinitely. The result is that people trying to come to the United States find “a wall of bureaucracy telling them that they’re not welcome here,” Shebaya said. These policies alone led to a fifty percent decrease in visas issued to people from Muslim-majority countries in 2017.

The Trump administration is also rolling back policies that have protected immigrants in the past, such as the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (DACA) program. In September 2017, the Trump administration announced its intention to terminate DACA—a decision that is currently being contested in court. Shebaya argued that repealing DACA, which protects undocumented immigrants brought into the country as children from deportation, would have a devastating effect on many Muslims, Arabs, and South Asians living in the United States.

As she further noted, the Trump administration is also withdrawing Temporary Protected Status (TPS) from some Muslim-majority nations, ending a program that previously prevented individuals from specific countries from being deported back to dangerous conditions. For example, Syrians who did not already have TPS can no longer obtain it, despite the fact that the United States government has declared that no part of Syria is currently safe for travel. Shebaya contended that deportations to unsafe countries violate the principle of non-refoulement—that individuals should not be forced to return to countries where they would face persecution.

Perhaps most worryingly, Shebaya said, the Trump administration has indicated that it may make use of an extreme tool in immigration law: revoking the citizenship of individuals who have become naturalized Americans. If the government adopts this practice, even Muslims who are citizens of the United States are at risk of being deported.

“Slowly, methodically, relentlessly,” Shebaya said, “this administration has used every tool at its disposal to slow down Muslim immigration and has the potential to change the face of the United States in the coming generation.” She concluded by calling on advocates to fight the normalization of discriminatory policies. “It is outrageous; it is an emergency,” she said. “We need to be fighting with everything we have to make it stop.”