How Trump Is Making U.S. Cities Easier Targets for Terror

Nearly every order he has issued relating to national security runs counter to the principles and practices of the men and women who actually secure the cities terrorists try to hit.

CHRISTOPHER DICKEY

01.30.17 1:15 AM ET

In one week, Donald Trump has made the United States a much, much more dangerous place for the vast majority of its people—those who live in cities—and terrorists are exulting. As the former head of Britain's MI6 intelligence operations, Richard Barrett, told the BBC on Monday: “The narrative of the Islamic State is precisely what Mr. Trump appears to be confirming—that Americans are against people of Muslim faith, they particularly discriminate against them in favour of other people. So it is this 'them or us' type picture that the Islamic State promotes.”

The divisiveness and anger spawned by the new American president may disturb the peace of other countries as well. Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau announced on Sunday that he would take the refugees the United States turns away. But, ominously, within hours a mosque in Quebec City was attacked. Six people were murdered as they prayed and eight more were injured. The identities of the alleged assailants have not yet been released, but the mosque had a pig's head left at its door last summer, and suspicions have focused on anti-Muslim fanatics. Trudeau called the shooting "a terrorist attack on Muslims."

The initial implementation of the Trump ban on refugees and visitors and immigrants and at first even green-card holders from Syria, Iraq, Iran, Libya, Sudan, Somalia, and Yemen has been wildly confused. Travelers from those countries with previously valid visas have been stranded aroudn the world. People fleeing religious persecution in Iran and seeking U.S. asylum—Evangelical Christians, Jews, and Baha'is—are being turned back from Austria where they normally would wait, usually for many months, for clearance finally to reach asylum in the United States. (The echoes of the U.S. turning away a ship full of Jews fleeing Germany before World War II are not lost on historically minded Europeans, especially after Trump's White House issued a statement on Holocaust Remembrance Day that made no mention whatsoever of the six million Jews who died.)

Inside the United States, where federal judges ruled those banned Muslims being held at airports must have the right to see lawyers, Customs and Border Patrol at Dulles Airport briefly opted not to comply with the courts. The American Civil Liberties Union reportedly was investigating other cases of noncompliance with the court orders in New York, Boston, Seattle, Los Angeles, and Chicago when the White House reversed course on green-card holders—legal permanent residents—and ruled they should be allowed in. Meanwhile, protests have broken out in cities across the nation.

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