Mobilization Against the Muslim Ban

Photo Credit by Les Talusan via https://www.nomuslimbanever.com/.

A week after taking office in 2017, then President Donald Trump issued the “Muslim Ban,” an executive order which immediately halted travel from seven predominantly muslim countries. As a result, people around the world were stranded in airports and legal residents of the US were being unlawfully detained by their government.

The response was swift; a mass of people flooded to airports to show solidarity and reveal to the wider world the harmful and discriminatory nature of the act. Through mainstream and social media they documented the immediate effects on travelers who became stranded, making the whole country a witness to injustice. Sharing these human stories also helped redeem the targets of the bans and counter the administration’s interpretation that the order was stopping potential threats to national security. The resulting coalition opposing the ban was one of the most diverse in recent years, bringing together people from religious and labor groups to immigration organizations.

This highly effective mobilization was not just a spontaneous expression of solidarity; Donald Trump had been talking about a “total and complete shutdown of Muslims” since 2015. Organizers were aware of this rhetoric, and were able to begin prepping the civil society infrastructure necessary for rapid response. 

Alongside the mass mobilization at airports was a swift response from independent lawyers and legal institutions which combined short term work of stopping deportations with long term strategies around halting the ban entirely. These efforts, carried by the public outrage, prompted a temporary block and then forced the issue to the Supreme Court–where they upheld a limited version of the order. 

Overall the public pressure generated a lot of unwanted attention for the administration and forced counter-responses from politicians. The significant and sustained mobilization around the ban undermined Trump’s goal of a total stoppage and helped usher in a rapid reversal once Biden came into office. The response also demonstrated to the wider world of civil society their mobilizing capacity, setting the foundations for the mass mobilizations to come.