By Reza Aslan
Updated 9:44 PM ET, Sun
January 29, 2017
(CNN)Donald Trump released a statement Sunday afternoon in response to the massive protests that have erupted across the country in response to his latest executive order freezing all refugees from Syria and banning entry to foreign nationals from seven Muslim-majority countries.
"To be clear," the statement read, "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."
As we have come to expect from Donald Trump, nearly every word of that sentence is false.
It is a Muslim ban. Rudy Giuliani admitted as much in talking about its origins on Fox News. "I'll tell you the whole story," he said. "So, when [Trump] announced it he said "Muslim ban." He called me up, he said, 'Put a commission together. Show me the right way to do it legally.'"
It is about religion. Trump said so on Christian Broadcast Network when he vowed that he would allow Christians to enter from the banned countries list but not Muslims. "If you were a Muslim, you could come in," Trump said, "but if you were a Christian, it was almost impossible," Trump said of our refugee system. This is, of course, another lie. According to the Pew Research Center, in 2016 the United States brought in 37,521 Christian refugees and 38,901 Muslims refugees.
It is not about terror. There is no great fear of terrorism from refugees. Of the 784,000 refugees resettled in the United States over the last 15 years, exactly three have been arrested for planning terrorist activities, according to a Cato Institute report by Alex Nowrasteh.
Of the 3,252,493 refugees admitted into the country from 1975 to 2016, 20 of them took part in terrorism. That's 0.00062%.
Of those 20, three were successful in actually carrying out the terror attack. Those three attacks killed a total of three people.
In fact, the likelihood of being killed in a terrorist attack perpetrated by an immigrant is 1 in 3.6 million, and that includes the total deaths in the attacks of 9/11.
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http://www.cnn.com/2017/01/29/opinions/what-trump-said-about-travel-ban-is-false-opinion-aslan/