The United States Supreme Court ruled in favor of allowing President Donald Trump’s travel ban to go into full effect on Monday, with only two justices voting against the ruling.
Seven of the nine justices ruled that the policy can take full effect despite challenges against it by lower-level courts, the Associated Press reported. Only liberal justices Ruth Bader Ginsburg and Sonia Sotomayor voted against the ruling.
The ruling means that travelers from Chad, Iran, Libya, Somalia, Syria and Yemen that have “bona fide” connections to the U.S. are banned from entering the U.S. while cases against the ban proceed, USA Today noted.
The AP and other news outlets that ran the AP’s original report failed to accurately report the full scope of the travel ban, which included Venezuela and North Korea — and instead portrayed it as a “Muslim ban,” as the AP failed to even mention those two countries.
On September 24, 2017, the White House released “Presidential Proclamation Enhancing Vetting Capabilities and Processes for Detecting Attempted Entry Into the United States by Terrorists or Other Public-Safety Threats” which stated the following:
The Secretary of Homeland Security assesses that the following countries continue to have “inadequate” identity-management protocols, information-sharing practices, and risk factors, with respect to the baseline described in subsection (c) of this section, such that entry restrictions and limitations are recommended: Chad, Iran, Libya, North Korea, Syria, Venezuela, and Yemen.
Even the left-leaning New York Times reported that North Korea and Venezuela were part of the ban, which makes the Associated Press’ decision to not list those two countries in their original report even more concerning.
This is exactly how “fake news” spreads. The Associated Press reported only six of the eight countries included in the latest version of the ban and noted that they were “six mostly Muslim countries.”
This allows the media to use the AP’s report as the basis for calling the travel ban a “Muslim ban,” which in turn creates unnecessary chaos and misinformation and allows the president’s critics to call him a bigot and a racist for targeting Muslim majority nations — despite the fact that North Korea and Venezuela have a small Muslim population. According to The Guardian, Islam makes up less than 0.1% of North Korea’s population and makes up approximately 0.3% of Venezuela’s population.
Within minutes of the AP’s initial report, the hashtag #NoMuslimBanEver was one of the top trending hashtags on Twitter, with people like Linda Sarsour spreading misinformation.
The AP eventually did add the following statement to their report (12 paragraphs down):
The travel policy also applies to travelers from North Korea and to some Venezuelan government officials and their families, but the lawsuits did not challenge those restrictions.