Dozens of protesters gathered outside a federal courthouse in Milwaukee Saturday to protest President Donald Trump’s temporary ban on travel and immigration from seven majority-Muslim countries.
Many of the more than 100 protesters are Iranian-born faculty and staff of the University of Wisconsin system, according to the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel.
Trump’s executive order, which intends to “suspend entry into the United States, as immigrants and nonimmigrants,” persons from Syria, Iraq, Iran, Libya, Sudan, Somalia and Yemen, spurred major protests at airports around the country.
“The ban is counter to longstanding U.S. norms against discrimination based on religion,” said UW-Madison political science professor Jessica Weeks, who specializes in foreign policy. “The ban on refugees is also counter to international humanitarian law and norms.”
On Monday, UW-Madison Chancellor Rebecca Blank joined with the Association of American Universities and the Association of Public and Land Grant Universities in “calling for a reconsideration of the administration’s new order.”
Despite his campaign’s previous proposal for religious testing upon entry to the United States, Trump denies that the order has any relation to restriction based on faith, and emphasizes its intention to safeguard domestic security.
“To be clear, this is not a Muslim ban, as the media is falsely reporting. This is not about religion — this is about terror and keeping our country safe,” Trump stated.
However, many have expressed concerns over the effectiveness of the order in promoting national security interests.
“If the order is designed to make America safer from terrorist attacks, then I believe it will unfortunately have the opposite effect,” Weeks said . “By sending the message that the United States is hostile to Muslims, I suspect that the order will be an effective recruiting tool for extremist groups.”
The order has undergone legal scrutiny as well; federal judges in New York, Washington, Virginia and Massachusetts ruled against the order in some capacity.
