“The fight in GAZA is ‘coming home’ to the USA,” said former President Donald Trump in a Monday Truth Social post.
Hamas, a Palestinian terrorist organization, conducted a surprise, large-scale attack on U.S. ally Israel earlier this month that killed around 1,300 people. Israel then declared war and fighting continues.
When Trump was president, his administration instituted a ban on immigrants from Muslim-majority countries. This list included Iran, Iraq, Libya, Somalia, Sudan, Syria and Yemen.
Now, Trump claims that “tens of thousands of strong young men from the Middle East,” have already “invaded” the U.S. Trump said they are “continuing to come, totally unchecked, will become a problem the likes of which we have never seen before.”
Although Hamas was elected to lead Palestinians, President Joe Biden has stressed that the group – which receives funding from Iran – does not represent all Palestinians. According to polling data cited by the Center for Strategic and International Studies, “the vast majority of Muslims do not support extremist violence.”
In 2021, the American Civil Liberties Union said that families were still separated due to the impact of the ban. A Yale-led study released that year also showed that the ban harmed the health of Muslim Americans, and other research indicates that anti-Muslim hate crimes have grown.
Last month, an article published by the Council on Foreign Relations said that most attacks in the U.S. from foreign terrorist groups are committed by legal immigrants or people born in the country. Overall, domestic terrorism has been on the rise in the U.S., the Government Accountability Office said earlier this year.
University of Pennsylvania’s Richard J. McAlexander has said that “there is little evidence to support the common claim that letting in more immigrants means letting in more terrorists.”
Around the time that the ban went into effect, a Brookings Institution expert also predicted that it would actually result in increased terrorism and that Trump could possibly benefit from the increase.
Trump is using the current situation in Gaza to campaign to be the GOP presidential candidate in 2024, and he’s calling for his ban to be reinstated.
“Crooked Joe Biden is a very ignorant (STUPID!) man, who has NEVER been right on a foreign policy issue in his life,” he said. “CLOSE OUR BORDER, NOW. STOP THE ONSLAUGHT, STOP THE INVASION!”
During an event in Iowa, said he would begin “ideological screening” for all immigrants and bar those who sympathize with Hamas and Muslim extremists, per The Guardian. While the Council on Foreign Relations expert said it is important to carefully watch for terrorism threats, it also said it is important to “counter the dehumanization of immigrants in American political rhetoric.”