President Donald Trump has revived his travel ban from his first term, which involves blanket restrictions on travellers from a host of overseas countries.

The first term’s restrictions were often referred to as a “Muslim ban” — even though they included a number of countries that were not Muslim-majority — because the candidate once pledged to pause all Muslim migration to the United States. Nationals from Afghanistan, Myanmar, Chad, Republic of the Congo, Equatorial Guinea, Eritrea, Haiti, Iran, Libya, Somalia, Sudan and Yemen will be fully barred from entering the country. Meanwhile people from Burundi, Cuba, Laos, Sierra Leone, Togo, Turkmenistan and Venezuela will be partially restricted.

The latest ban appears to deviate even further from the original campaign proposal: of the 12 countries chosen for total bans and the seven selected for more severe travel restrictions, several are not Muslim-majority. One might notice, for instance, that Haiti is now on the list — it didn’t face such restrictions during Trump’s first term.

The White House’s official explanation is that the restrictions bolster national security, with the President stating in his executive action that many of these countries are “deficient with regard to screening and vetting” the people they send to the United States. In the administration’s telling, this will reduce American exposure to terrorism risk.

But as Alex Nowrasteh from the libertarian Cato Institute pointed out, those countries have produced a grand total of one terrorist who murdered anyone on American soil in the past few decades.

More likely, the travel ban is immigration policy disguised as national security policy. It should come as no surprise, then, that key administration officials like immigration and domestic policy advisor Stephen Miller and Vice President JD Vance are likely driving this policy.

It’s easy to recall the false rumours spread by Trump and Vance about Haitian Americans eating cats and dogs in Ohio, but this alarmist claim was couched in a wider concern about the impact of these immigrants on the Vice President’s home state. Vance argued vigorously that even legal Haitian immigrants were putting undue pressure on American housing costs, potentially spreading disease, and contributing to general American social instability.

For the administration, then, the travel ban can serve as an end run around Congress and the general public, who remain unconvinced that a total ban on travel from Haiti and other countries is necessary; the presidency’s powers as they relate to national security are vast, and the expansion of the national security state since the 9/11 attacks has given the executive branch wide leeway to take what could be considered emergency actions to reshape American society.

There will undoubtedly be lawsuits against this travel ban as there were against the previous iteration, but we can expect that some form of it will withstand legal scrutiny. The executive branch’s power over immigration policy is vast, and the courts will likely give Trump a lot of breathing room.

But even if he ultimately succeeds in court, it may end up undermining some of his other priorities. Trump has made no secret of the fact that he wants to see a nuclear deal with Iran. Resolving the complex issue of Iran’s uranium enrichment is one challenge; imposing blanket restrictions on Iranian citizens traveling to the US risks triggering a new diplomatic crisis at the worst possible moment.

Ultimately, it is true that Trump returned to power largely due to the American public’s frustrations with the previous administration’s liberal immigration policies. But Trump has to be careful not to overreach and interpret his mandate as permission to run to the other extreme. Americans may oppose illegal immigration and abuse of the asylum system, but they are generally welcoming to law-abiding, legitimate immigrants.

The middle ground on immigration is the best place to be; the question is whether either major party can stand on it.

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Zaid Jilani is a journalist who has worked for UC Berkeley’s Greater Good Science Center, The Intercept, and the Center for American Progress.

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