— At 8 p.m. tonight,
Travel Ban 2.0 officially goes into effect.
And this time around,
there probably won’t be scenes of chaos
and families separated,
because unlike the first travel ban announcement,
this one didn't come out of thin air.
72 hours ago,
the Supreme Court allowed a revised
version of the ban to go into effect,
as they wait until the fall
to hear the Constitutional arguments
around the President’s order.
But in the meantime, there are exceptions:
Any person from the six targeted countries
with “a credible claim of a bona fide relationship
with a person or entity” in the U.S. can come in.
The problem is,
there’s no standard legal definition of
a “bona fide relationship”—
vague language from the Supreme Court
means that the Trump administration's
State Department gets to fill the blanks.
And overnight, they did.
According to the State Department,
a bona fide relationship is essentially
a parent, child, spouse, sibling,
and daughter- or son-in-law.
Lawyers say they’ll be stationed
here at JFK throughout the day,
because they’re expecting confusion
around what the term really means.
— There’s no definition.
There’s no immigration legal definition
for what a bona fide relationship is.
There are other terms that qualify relationships
in immigration law that are defined—
“bona fide relationship” is not one of them.
It was left to the discretion of
the administration to implement.
— The administration said on a briefing call today
that they basically cribbed the definition of
family from the Immigration and Nationality Act,
and added mothers- and fathers-in-laws
because the court told them to.
But for the communities actually affected by the ban,
the prospect of having to defend certain
family relationships is downright offensive.
— I am Syrian-American, so, to us, you know,
family is more than just your nuclear family.
It creates a lot of confusion to
try and explain what that means.
— So there’s a little bit of a cultural discrepancy there,
between how the State Department has defined families
and what they actually mean in various
cultures that this is going to impact.
— Yes, definitely.
I think it’s dangerous when a government
is trying to redefine what family means.
