Trump travel ban kept 30,000 people from entering U.S.

President Trump’s travel ban has kept more than 30,000 people from entering the U.S., officials revealed to Congress on Tuesday, though they said they’re doing a better job of granted waivers to people with hardship cases who deserve a chance to enter.

The State Department approved thousands of waivers from July to mid-September, doubling the approval rate to 10% in that time, said Edward Ramotowski, deputy assistant secretary for visa services at the State Department.

“Just in the past two months we’ve doubled the number of waivers issued. There will more and more going forward from this time. I’m sure some are being issued today. So we expect there will be a significant decrease in processing time for everybody,” he told a joint hearing of the House Judiciary and Foreign Affairs committees.

He gave the clearest look yet at how Mr. Trump’s controversial policy is operating two years after the current version was announced, imposing limits on citizens from eight countries to enter the U.S., based on security and terrorism concerns.

More than 72,000 people from travel ban countries have applied for visas since the inception of the policy. Of those, 7,679 had been granted waivers — half of them in just the last two months, as the new automated system kicked in, Mr. Ramotowski said.

Another 5,137 qualified for exceptions Mr. Trump wrote into his travel ban and didn’t need waivers.

Some 17,000 applicants are awaiting decisions, while nearly 13,000 were denied because of other aspects of immigration law. That leaves more than 30,000 who were denied waivers and excluded because of the travel ban.

To get a waiver, applicants must clear scrutiny of State Department consular officers, who rule on whether they have hardship or national interest claims that justify an exception, and then must clear an interagency security process.

Waivers are at the crux of the travel ban.

When a divided Supreme Court ruled last year that the travel ban policy was legal in principle, the justices said having a waiver was a key safety valve.

Through March of this year, 5% of those seeking waivers had been approved, including just 1.3% of those who applied for visas from Iran.

Immigrant rights groups said that was proof the administration was slow-walking applications, effectively creating a secret travel ban even for those who should have qualified. Lawsuits are ongoing over individual cases.

Trump administration officials told Congress, though, that the new system should speed up approvals. All applications pending as of July “should be completed by the end of 2019 or soon thereafter,” Mr. Ramotowski said.

Tuesday’s hearing was scheduled for the two-year mark since the current travel ban policy was issued. That Sept. 24, 2017, version was the third iteration, after the two previous ones were curtailed by the courts.

The current version covers seven countries. Iran, Libya, Somalia, Syria and Yemen, all on the list, are majority-Muslim. Two others — Venezuela and North Korea — are not.

Officials said the countries are on the list because they refuse to cooperate with U.S. requests for travel information, leaving American officials without assurances that they can property vet citizens of those countries.

The State Department says it reviews the list every 180 days and lets the president know whether it should be updated.

Democrats, though, remain angry over the original version, which Mr. Trump announced just days after his inauguration and which applied to seven majority-Muslim countries. It took State Department and Homeland Security officials by surprise and created chaotic scenes at airports across the U.S.

“The Muslim ban has not made us safer,” said Rep. Jerrold Nadler, New York Democrat. “It has weakened our standing in the world and runs contrary to our country’s moral and philosophical foundation.”

Republicans countered that the countries on the list only make up 8% of the world’s Muslim population, saying that undercuts the “Muslim ban” epithet.