Homeland Security Secretary John Kelly on Monday said his department is looking at creating a new list of more than a dozen countries where vetting procedures do not meet U.S. standards and need to be strengthened. Those nations, he said, would not be added to President Trump’s updated executive order, but would be part of a separate one.
DHS is looking at 13 or 14 other nations, “not all of them Muslim countries, not all of them in the Middle East,” that have “very questionable vetting procedures that the U.S. depends on, Kelly told CNN host Wolf Blitzer on Monday evening.
“When we come up with additional vetting to protect the nation, better than it’s been protected, there will probably be other countries we will look at and say we want you to improve,” Kelly said. “There are countries out there that we’ll ask, like Iraq has done, by the involvement of their prime minister, to cooperate with us better, to get us the information we need, to safeguard the country.”
Iraq was the only country to be removed from the original executive order because of its enhanced cooperation with the State Department, the administration said.
Earlier Monday, Trump signed a new order that excludes Iraqi citizens, legal permanent residents and existing visa holders from a list of six countries in the Middle East and North Africa from entering for 90 days, starting March 16.
Kelly also decried the public’s calling Trump’s revisions to a Jan. 27 executive order on immigration from seven countries a “Muslim ban.”
“They’re calling it a Muslim ban,” CNN host Wolf Blitzer told Kelly on Monday evening.
“But it’s not a Muslim ban,” Kelly responded.
“The countries are all Muslim,” Blitzer said.
“There are 1.7 billion Muslims on the planet. There are something on the order of 51 overwhelmingly Muslim countries. We had seven, now six, to the tune of maybe a couple hundred million predominantly Muslims who were put on the list,” Kelly said. “And it’s a pause as we look at ways that we can better vet these countries. And these countries represent six or seven that we knew about.”
