Several former U.S. officials plan to file an affidavit against President Trump’s executive order on immigration, arguing it makes the U.S. less safe, NBC News reported Monday.
The group, consisting of 10 former senior U.S. diplomats and security officials, described the order as “ill-conceived, poorly implemented and ill-explained,” according the document, which obtained by NBC News.
"This order cannot be justified on national security or foreign policy grounds,” the affidavit reads. “It does not perform its declared task of 'protecting the nation from foreign terrorist entry into the United States.”
The group includes former Secretaries of State John Kerry and Madeleine Albright, as well as former Homeland Security Secretary Janet Napolitano and former Obama National Security Adviser Susan Rice. It also includes former CIA Director Michael Hayden, who served under former President George W. Bush, and John McClaughlin, who was deputy director of the CIA under Bush and former President Bill Clinton.
"Since September 11, 2001, not a single terrorist attack in the United States has been perpetrated by aliens from the countries named in the order," the group says in the brief. "Very few attacks on U.S. soil since September 11, 2001 have been traced to foreign nationals at all."
On Sunday morning, the U.S. 9th Circuit Court of Appeals rejected the Trump administration’s appeal to restore his executive order.
The former officials' affidavit advises the court to not reinstate the ban, which was halted by a federal judge in Seattle on Friday.
Trump signed an executive order last month temporarily prohibiting the entry of visitors from seven Muslim-majority nations to the U.S. The order also temporarily blocked all refugees and indefinitely blocked refugees from war-torn Syria from entering the U.S.
|