The Trump Administration is Radically Overhauling Its Travel Ban Policy—Again

President Donald Trump is planning to unveil yet another iteration of his oft-promised, legally dubious travel ban, the New York Times reported on Friday.

While earlier versions of the administration’s travel bans—all of which have been litigated over and over again in the court system—barred nearly all travel into the U.S. from seven, and then six, predominantly Muslim countries, this new policy would reportedly change the list of affected nations once again, tailoring specific travel restrictions to each one.

“The Trump administration will ensure that the people who travel to the United States are properly vetted and those that don’t belong here aren’t allowed to enter,” Department of Homeland Security Assistant Secretary for Public Affairs Jonathan Hoffman told the Times, without confirming details of the forthcoming plan.

The new travel policies come as a 90-day review period of the original ban comes to a close. According to the Wall Street Journal, an estimated eight or nine countries will likely be targeted in this latest iteration of the administration’s travel policy.

“They’re now creating sticks where there once were carrots,” one Obama-era DHS official told the Journal, explaining that while previous White Houses had tried to incentivize tougher security measures from other nations, the Trump administration is doing so with threats to ban travel to the U.S. from certain countries.

As the Times notes, any new policy will still need to be approved by the president himself. However, as details emerge about this latest iteration of the travel ban, they seem to be roughly lining up with Trump’s September 15 statement, in which he tweeted:

It is unclear how this new proposal would affect the current litigation surrounding the previous versions of the administration’s travel ban.

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