The TWAN team's worksheet, calculating the immigration numbers.
Feb 14 // Jan 30 2017
We don't claim to be math wizards but this is ridiculous.
When does 109 = 130,000,000? When you count the number of immigrants who were banned from entry.
So Attorney General Sally Yates got fired.
She was planning to leave the position in a matter of days, given that she was a holdover from the last administration. But in light of the Executive Order restricting travel into this country from a select group of middle-eastern countries she probably figured, if not now, when?
Ms. Yates basically told everyone who worked for her at the Justice Department not to enforce the Executive Order. She did not agree that it was correct from a legal point of view and chose to die on that hill, so to speak, rather than enforce what she saw as an illegal action by the President.
That took guts but then again, she wasn’t exactly risking her job to do it.
None of this stopped the outrage – we were outraged! – at the President’s response to her decision. He fired her. Outrageous.
Is it? Leaving aside the particulars – the web is littered with articles that will absolutely argue with great vigor and even greater certainty the opposite sides of this issue - the closest we came to clarity was this: For the refugees (between 100 and 200 according to the numbers we found in several sources) who had already gone through their vetting, were holding the appropriate visas and been granted permission to enter the United States, this has been nothing less than a colossal nightmare. They played by the rules; they did everything right. And then the rules changed in the middle of the game. They called foul – or rather, their attorneys did – and they were right to do it.
For everyone who had not completed the application process, as Bill Maher says: New rules. Sorry. But the new guy set up new rules. Chalk it up to bad timing if you’re a good person who now faces many more months of paperwork and red tape before getting the approvals needed to travel to the U.S. Call it spectacularly bad timing if you’re a terrorist trying to enter the U.S. It’s just a little tougher than it used to be.
This all gets really, really murky if you keep digging. The order itself may have been legal, but it was its “purpose” that Yates called into question and chose to fight. Was the order nothing more than a legal way to ban Muslims? Was that its purpose? Discrimination?
Possible. Maybe even likely. And we’re pretty sure the law has something to say about discriminating against a group due to religion, even if you’re the President and even if you write Executive Orders day and night, night and day.
But here’s the question we have at Two Weeks Ago News. And really, it’s the only one we plan to keep asking with every post. Still outraged, are you? Still posting and tweeting endlessly about this?
Maybe not. Maybe because the people who were caught in the snarls have been untangled, not without great effort and great pain. But unsnarled nonetheless. On January 30, a NY Post article stated that all 109 people detained under the travel ban had been released. End of story, right?
Nope. The Washington Post calls that number into serious question. Sure, 109 were detained – those who were in transit at the time. Plus another 200 – 250 who were denied entry once they landed. (Wouldn’t that mean there were 309 to 359 people detained, not 109? Maybe they were the ones sent right back where they came from.) Plus another 750 who could have been barred. (Could have been? Does that mean they were or they weren’t?) Plus another 348 – 940 people who weren’t allowed to board their flights to the United States because of the ban. Plus another 392 – 1,600 green card holders.
Confused yet? How many travelers did this impact? That depends. If by “traveler” you count everyone who is holding a U.S. visa in the named countries and if by “impact” you mean “could face restrictions and further delays and red tape sometime in the next six months,” that’s something like 90,000 people. Unless you’re a member of the White House staff, who reduced that figure to 60,000. Unless you’re from KTLA News, who reported that the order would ban more than 130 million people from entering the U.S.
So let's sum up. As near as we can determine at Two Weeks Ago News, that means the number is somewhere between 100 and 130,000,000.
Our collective head hurts. But good people working for the greater good resolved the challenges other good people were facing when this poorly conceived and even more poorly executed ban was imposed. That's outrageously good news for all of us. The law and doing the right thing prevails.
What’s outrageously bad for all of us is that we can’t seem to find two news organizations on the planet that agree with the number of people who were impacted by the U.S. travel ban. This is supposed to be news. Quantifiable. Measurable. Something we can all understand, think through and determine what response is called for as a result of the facts. It’s far from it.
Maybe we should all start posting incessantly about that outrage.
We don't claim to be math wizards but this is ridiculous.
When does 109 = 130,000,000? When you count the number of immigrants who were banned from entry.
So Attorney General Sally Yates got fired.
She was planning to leave the position in a matter of days, given that she was a holdover from the last administration. But in light of the Executive Order restricting travel into this country from a select group of middle-eastern countries she probably figured, if not now, when?
Ms. Yates basically told everyone who worked for her at the Justice Department not to enforce the Executive Order. She did not agree that it was correct from a legal point of view and chose to die on that hill, so to speak, rather than enforce what she saw as an illegal action by the President.
That took guts but then again, she wasn’t exactly risking her job to do it.
None of this stopped the outrage – we were outraged! – at the President’s response to her decision. He fired her. Outrageous.
Is it? Leaving aside the particulars – the web is littered with articles that will absolutely argue with great vigor and even greater certainty the opposite sides of this issue - the closest we came to clarity was this: For the refugees (between 100 and 200 according to the numbers we found in several sources) who had already gone through their vetting, were holding the appropriate visas and been granted permission to enter the United States, this has been nothing less than a colossal nightmare. They played by the rules; they did everything right. And then the rules changed in the middle of the game. They called foul – or rather, their attorneys did – and they were right to do it.
For everyone who had not completed the application process, as Bill Maher says: New rules. Sorry. But the new guy set up new rules. Chalk it up to bad timing if you’re a good person who now faces many more months of paperwork and red tape before getting the approvals needed to travel to the U.S. Call it spectacularly bad timing if you’re a terrorist trying to enter the U.S. It’s just a little tougher than it used to be.
This all gets really, really murky if you keep digging. The order itself may have been legal, but it was its “purpose” that Yates called into question and chose to fight. Was the order nothing more than a legal way to ban Muslims? Was that its purpose? Discrimination?
Possible. Maybe even likely. And we’re pretty sure the law has something to say about discriminating against a group due to religion, even if you’re the President and even if you write Executive Orders day and night, night and day.
But here’s the question we have at Two Weeks Ago News. And really, it’s the only one we plan to keep asking with every post. Still outraged, are you? Still posting and tweeting endlessly about this?
Maybe not. Maybe because the people who were caught in the snarls have been untangled, not without great effort and great pain. But unsnarled nonetheless. On January 30, a NY Post article stated that all 109 people detained under the travel ban had been released. End of story, right?
Nope. The Washington Post calls that number into serious question. Sure, 109 were detained – those who were in transit at the time. Plus another 200 – 250 who were denied entry once they landed. (Wouldn’t that mean there were 309 to 359 people detained, not 109? Maybe they were the ones sent right back where they came from.) Plus another 750 who could have been barred. (Could have been? Does that mean they were or they weren’t?) Plus another 348 – 940 people who weren’t allowed to board their flights to the United States because of the ban. Plus another 392 – 1,600 green card holders.
Confused yet? How many travelers did this impact? That depends. If by “traveler” you count everyone who is holding a U.S. visa in the named countries and if by “impact” you mean “could face restrictions and further delays and red tape sometime in the next six months,” that’s something like 90,000 people. Unless you’re a member of the White House staff, who reduced that figure to 60,000. Unless you’re from KTLA News, who reported that the order would ban more than 130 million people from entering the U.S.
So let's sum up. As near as we can determine at Two Weeks Ago News, that means the number is somewhere between 100 and 130,000,000.
Our collective head hurts. But good people working for the greater good resolved the challenges other good people were facing when this poorly conceived and even more poorly executed ban was imposed. That's outrageously good news for all of us. The law and doing the right thing prevails.
What’s outrageously bad for all of us is that we can’t seem to find two news organizations on the planet that agree with the number of people who were impacted by the U.S. travel ban. This is supposed to be news. Quantifiable. Measurable. Something we can all understand, think through and determine what response is called for as a result of the facts. It’s far from it.
Maybe we should all start posting incessantly about that outrage.