Senior officials in the Trump administration are working on plans to limit both temporary visits and legal immigration for Muslims linked to the revolutionary Muslim Brotherhood and similar extremist organizations.
Joe Edlow, director of the U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services, stated, “We are reassessing sections of the INA [Immigration and Nationality Act] that have not been previously utilized. This effort aims to gain a clearer understanding of the applicants, allowing us to better determine methods to block militant Muslims from entry.”
He further explained, “It’s crucial to ensure that prospective immigrants do not support ideologies that threaten the country’s safety and security,” as quoted by – News on Monday.
According to Secretary of State Marco Rubio in a discussion with radio host Sid Rosenberg, officials are considering branding some Islamic groups with ties to the expansive Muslim Brotherhood network as terrorists. Rubio mentioned, “All of that is in progress. Since the Muslim Brotherhood consists of various branches, each would need to be individually designated.”
The Muslim Brotherhood was formed in the aftermath of the Turkish Empire’s fall during World War I. Its aim is the establishment of a devout ruler, known as the Caliph, to enforce strict Islamic law on Muslim communities worldwide.
The group, largely led by Muslim university graduates living in Europe and the United States, is suppressed by nearly all Arab countries.
The movement has given rise to numerous affiliated groups serving specific roles, both lawful and unlawful. These affiliates range from terrorist organizations like Hamas to charities, mosques, and entities involved in fundraising, advocacy for migration, and politics.
So far, Western governments have done little to stop Islamic migration or the spread of the Muslim Brotherhood in their countries. In May, – News reported:
An explosive report from the French government alleges the Islamist Muslim Brotherhood network has embarked upon a decades-long effort to forge a fifth column in France and across Europe through infiltrating government institutions and radicalising Muslim communities, while veiling their true intentions with supposedly noble causes such as fighting “Islamophobia”.
Starting in the 1950s with the emerging “religious consciousness” among Islamic immigrant workers, the Muslim Brotherhood has since “designed the matrix of political Islamism adapted to be established in the West,” a report commissioned by the French government has found, according to the national paper of record Le Figaro.
Paris intelligence said that after facing pushback in the Islamic world in the middle of the last century, the Egypt-founded Muslim Brotherhood turned its sights on Europe, initially in countries like the UK, Germany, and Switzerland and later spreading to Belgium, Italy, and France in a bid to restart the Islamic “Western conquest strategy.” Muslim Brotherhood founder Hassan al-Banna is cited as having then said: “We will pursue this evil force to its own lands, invade its Western heartland and fight to defeat it until the whole world cries out in the name of the Prophet.”
The report found that the Muslim Brotherhood has not only clandestinely taken control of local Islamic institutions, thereby often controlling all aspects of many Muslims’ lives, but it has also actively infiltrated government programmes in France and the European Union, often using hot button issues such as “Islamophobia” — a term coined by the Muslim Brotherhood — to both rally support as well as masking their true efforts of “subversion” of the West under a cloak of legitimacy.
Both Rubio and Edlow warned that officials must protect Americans’ legal rights as they try to constrain the Brotherhood’s revolutionary political movement.
“These things are going to be challenged in court,” Rubio told Rosenberg:
Any group can say, ‘Well, I’m not really a terrorist, that organization is not a terrorist organization… You have to show your work like a math problem when you go before court. All you need is one federal judge — and there are plenty — that are willing to do these nationwide injunctions and basically try to run the country from the bench. So we’ve got to be so careful.
Rubio’s deputies are already facing lawsuits as they try to deny legal entry to migrant visitors who support attacks on Israel.
“‘I’m not going to give you a date,” Edlow told – News, adding:
It’s going to take some time… You will see the AILA [America Immigration Lawyers Association] crowd getting a little uncomfortable in a couple weeks when it’s not a sure-fire thing that people are going to walk in and walk out with a naturalization approval the same day.
U.S. immigration law includes multiple historical layers of political tests for screening would-be legal migrants, including communists and Nazi guards at concentration camps. “In general, any immigrant who is or has been a member of or affiliated with the Communist or any other totalitarian party (or subdivision or affiliate), domestic or foreign, is inadmissible,” according to the USCIS.
Similarly, the loyalty oath taken by citizen candidates says:
I hereby declare, on oath, that I absolutely and entirely renounce and abjure all allegiance and fidelity to any foreign prince, potentate, state, or sovereignty, of whom or which I have heretofore been a subject or citizen… I take this obligation freely, without any mental reservation or purpose of evasion; so help me God.
– asked Edlow if the rules should be updated to include new threats, such as militant Islam.
“Communism is a threat, but the number of people that were Nazi prison guards probably has diminished substantially, and will continue to until there are none [alive],” replied Edlow. “Nothing’s off the table.”
“I want to make sure people have good moral character, and ultimately they are going to be really good Americans and people that are going to make this country everything that it should be,” Edlow said.
