On January 27, without consulting his Justice Department or fully briefing his homeland security secretary, Trump issued a travel ban barring citizens and refugees from seven majority-Muslim countries from entering the United States. Chaos reigned at large international airports, and immigration lawyers filed emergency petitions asking federal courts to intervene to halt enforcement of the ban, arguing that it was unconstitutional.
The ban was drafted in secret by Bannon and Stephen Miller, Trump’s thirty-one-year-old senior policy adviser and a hard-line opponent of illegal immigration. They didn’t consult McGahn or Yates about its legal framework. Secretary of Homeland Security John Kelly, whose department had to enforce the ban, never got to see the final version until after Trump delivered his executive order. Kelly was on a plane when the ban went into effect, which meant his deputy had to arrange an emergency conference call to explain to top department officials how it would be enforced, and didn’t have a copy of the document itself. Customs and Border Protection agents, wholly confused by the order’s language, inconsistently enforced a part of the ban that was later found to be illegal: barring people who had green cards from returning to their homes in the United States. Even Trump’s allies acknowledged the unmitigated disaster.
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