Starting today, the Trump administration will impose a long-expected revamp of the cruel policy that made it very clear during the early days of his first term that the president was not bluffing on his desire to indiscriminately target entire classes of immigrants in his promised crackdown: the travel ban.

This time, President Donald Trump has singled out Afghanistan, Myanmar, Chad, Congo Republic, Equatorial Guinea, Eritrea, Haiti, Iran, Libya, Somalia, Sudan and Yemen for full bans, with seven others restricted.

While the authority that Trump is leaning on does exist in the law and has been used by prior presidents, these uses were things like barring entry of people engaged in “actions or policies that threaten the peace, security, or stability of Burundi.” It was not until Trump and Stephen Miller that a president even attempted to expand this law to claim that entire countries are somehow detrimental to U.S. interests or inherently dangerous.

It was a weak enough argument that, during his first term, Trump‘s first two iterations of what is now known as the Muslim Ban were struck down, only for the Supreme Court to allow a third after the administration threw in Venezuela and North Korea to claim that it was not motivated by any racial or religious animus.

This was a procedural trick and everyone knew it; there was no basis for this move other than wanting to keep certain people out of the country. No one has to nor should pretend that the old ban nor this one have anything to do with protecting the United States, just the same Miller’s zeal for ICE arrests does not, by his own recent admission, have anything to do with clamping down on criminality but rather taking as many people into custody as possible, for the simple fact that they are immigrants.

We would challenge Miller and the other officials rolling out the travel ban to explain why, for example, an ailing Haitian grandmother who wishes to come to the United States to receive our world-class cancer treatment should be presumptively barred from doing so. Yet, we don’t really think that they have any real interest in explaining the logic because whatever logic is secondary to the overarching objective of barring some kinds of people from the United States.

The administration will claim, as it did during the first term, that there are reasonable carve-outs to these orders, but we can’t say we really trust them to apply these standards cogently or fairly. After all, they’ve already made something of a habit of arbitrary violations of law, as demonstrated by D.C. Federal Judge James Boasberg‘s recent ruling that the entirety of the administration’s Alien Enemies Act removals of Venezuelan nationals to the CECOT mega-prison in El Salvador were unlawful, and that the administration should prepare to bring those individuals back to the United States.

Shame on the high court for validating this overreach in the president’s power to regulate immigration, which serves no purpose than throwing red meat to the base and collectively punishing innocent people from whole countries based on vague national security concerns or, to be more accurate and specific about it, their ethnic and religious background, in violation of our principles as a nation.

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