A lawmaker said the recent partial blocking of US President Donald Trump's travel ban by a federal judge reveals that the US domestic policies is suffer from confusion.
In a recent talk with ICANA, Mohammad Ebrahim Rezaei, a member of Majlis National Security and Foreign Policy Commission, said the partial lifting of the ban demonstrates that "the decisions of the new US government are not based on rational principles of politics and diplomacy".
A federal judge in Seattle partially blocked Trump's latest restrictions on refugee admissions on Saturday, marking a fresh legal defeat for his efforts to curtail immigration and travel to the United States.
Saturday's ruling represented the second legal defeat in two days for the Trump administration. On Friday, a US appeals court said Trump's travel ban targeting Muslim-majority countries should not be applied to people with strong US ties, but said its ruling would be put on hold pending a decision by the US Supreme Court.
Since assuming office in January, Trump, who promised as a candidate to impose "a total and complete shutdown of Muslims entering the United States", has imposed travel bans on the nationals of 11 countries, a majority of whom are Muslim nations.
Saudi Arabia—whose nationals constituted 15 out of 19 hijackers who slammed two planes into twin towers of the World Trade Center on Sept. 11, 2001—was conspicuously excluded from the list.
The ban means that the US would subject prospective travelers to a "security review" before entering the US. The countries subject to the rigorous review process are Egypt, Iran, Iraq, Libya, Mali, North Korea, Somalia, South Sudan, Sudan, Syria and Yemen.
Trump's travel ban has suffered repeated setbacks at the hands of US judges who have deemed it "unconstitutional". However, after long arguments, the US Supreme Court ruled in early December that the ban on travelers from those countries could be immediately imposed.
***At Odds With Rights Claims
Rezaei underlined the discriminatory nature of the travel ban, saying the US, which claims to defend human rights and criticizes others when it deems them to be flouting human rights, behaves in stark contrast to such claims.
In the same vein, lawmaker Shahrouz Barzegar said the partial blocking of Trump's travel ban shows "the US establishment is experiencing disorganization and tension in making policies."
"The travel ban was blocked in the past before it was reinstated [by the US Supreme Court], and is now again partially blocked. One has to admit that this reflects instability in the US ruling system," he said.
Censuring the US for including Iranian nationals in the list, Barzegar said the Islamic Republic helped the eradication of Daesh terrorists (the Arabic name of the self-styled Islamic State) in the region.
"The US would better ensure the security of its people, if it wants to go after terrorist-breeding nations instead of creating restrictions for the Iranian people," he said, in an apparent reference to Saudi Arabia whose nationals and ideology are blamed for the rise of terrorist groups such as IS and Al-Qaeda.
