a) is because as I understand it it's /very/ hard to legally refuse to readmit a US citizen. You can seize all their stuff at the border but besides arresting them for a crime you can't really keep them from coming home.
You can't refuse to readmit a US citizen (as in a person that can prove that they're readily a US citizen). They can force you into quarantine and take all your stuff, but you have a right to be in the country.
Even without a passport? If I rocked up to the border of my country without a passport I'm pretty sure I'd be thrown into a detention centre if I wasn't deported on the spot.
Yes, you cannot be refused entry as a US citizen even without a passport. You will be greatly inconvenienced, but not refused. You may be held in a detention center or holding facility until such time as your identity can be verified.
You'd be detained but if you asserted you are a US citizen they are obligated to try and establish the truth of your claim. They'll call family and friends and access government records. In an edge case, I imagine they'd hold a hearing with an immigration judge.
In college, friends of mine frequently went out partying in Tijuana and occasionally lost their passports. They were usually held for a few hours at the border crossing and given a hard time and a stern lecture about responsible behaviour before being readmitted to the US.
You and OP are both right. No one will let you (as a US citizen) board an aircraft back to the US without a passport (so you'll have to head over to a local embassy to get a replacement if you don't have one on your person), but CBP must (not shall, must) allow you re-admittance at a land border without a passport (at which point they will verify your citizenship through a tedious process).
> You can't refuse to readmit a US citizen (as in a person that can prove that they're readily a US citizen)
Note the: as in a person that can prove that they're readily a US citizen. If you don't have a passport, you probably can't readily prove you are a citizen.
> a) is because as I understand it it's /very/ hard to legally refuse to readmit a US citizen. You can seize all their stuff at the border but besides arresting them for a crime you can't really keep them from coming home.
The trick is to get the airline to be your police and refuse them boarding. Then your only choice is to get to a Port of Entry via Canada, Mexico, private jet or chartered boat.
There may well be flights. Crew are exempt, so at least for slot-controlled airports it's probably worth flying anyway to keep the slot; you'll have some US citizens / permanent residents and their families, and you can fill the belly with cargo since you have spare weight. Might be worth it even for airports that aren't slot-controlled.
Here in NZ the largest airport with such slots has waived that rule for the duration meaning that airlines can reduce their flights without losing their slots (and therefore be more likely still be around to be a customer for the airport when it is all over)
Various aviation authorities in Europe are relaxing the requirements that is driving the slot controls & ghost flights. Don't have the link now but read it earlier.
I suspect UK was left off because POTUS has resorts in Ireland and Scotland, and no where in Europe. There's nothing credible about UK being off the list while every surrounding country is on it.
The UK is an Island nation with entry controls - passports are required even from the EU and there is at least token screening at the airports and docks of people with fever or other virus symptoms.
Not that it’s the same thing, but being an island (so no walking traffic) and having some screening in place means that the UK simply doesn’t have certain diseases (like rabies) that are at least somewhat common in Europe.
Honestly though, the UK is one of, if not THE, staunchest ally of the US and banning its citizens would cause some minor political issues.
Note that technically the UK does not require passports for entry from the EU - identity cards are also fine.
Having travelled back to the UK from a Schengen country in the past few days, I can also confirm that there wasn’t so much as a poster in the airport, let alone any actual screening.
I don't think I've ever had anything that even counts as token screening flying into the UK from Europe - passport check is automated and I've never even seen someone at customs for many years.
No offence intended to Americans, but those guys are culturally much tougher negotiators than us. When they know they have leverage over you they don't hold back at all. We get caught out by this over and over again because we speak the same language so we think we understand what's going on, but we aren't awake to the nuances.
You might want to google Tizard Exchange for what happens when the US has us over a barrel. Or look at the outcomes of pretty much any attempt to extradite an American citizen vs US attempts to extradite a UK citizen.
If at all possible, try to get a flight back on a US carrier or a connecting flight via London. It's more likely that Delta/United/American will operate a flight back to the US than for example Lufthansa flying a mostly empty plane to the US. Not in the least because it would look bad in PR terms for a US based airline to leave US citizens stranded in Europe, while a European carrier not flying to the US would attribute the same decision to "Trump does not allow us in".
IANAL, but while lawful permanent residents do not have the same protections, they still have certain protections that make it legally unclear whether the president can categorically bar entry without an immigration court proceeding for each individual:
"Section 212(f) can certainly apply to applicants for immigrant visas. Whether it can apply to an LPR who is returning and not seeking admission is questionable. This is because under section 101(a)(13)(C), an LPR being covered by a Presidential Proclamation under section 212(f) would not cause the LPR to be considered to be seeking admission."
"An alien returning to the United States who has been granted lawful permanent resident status cannot be regarded as seeking an admission and may not be charged with inadmissibility under section 212(a) of the Immigration and Nationality Act, 8 U.S.C. § 1182(a) (2012), if he or she does not fall within any of the exceptions in section 101(a)(13)(C) of the Act, 8 U.S.C. § 1101(a)(13)(C) (2012)."
As a side-note: I saw the forms that my great grandparents had to fill out when entering the US from Europe back in 1905 or thereabouts. There was a checkbox for "anarchist"
I live on an island. There are all sorts of weird legal things that play out on these bits of rock. I suspect that there are all sorts of lawyers reading interesting bits of definitions of treaties and history right now.
They don't need to be routed through a non-European destination. Crew are exempt. The airlines will just deny boarding to people subject to the ban (which is non-exempt people who have been in Schengen in the last 14 days, not people who just came from there).
Just because citizens can legally return does not mean that doing so is viable or economical - the government has no legal obligation to make sure there are 1) flights to and from the US that 2) are affordable. Those are going to be the big issues.
I don't know for sure but my assumption is that H1B holders (and potentially green card holders, which are "permanent residents") are not excluded from this ban. As many others have mentioned here it's not easy to prevent a citizen from returning; permanent residents and visa holders can be refused entry much more easily.
I didn't write this rule though so I don't know if this interpretation is correct.
Most importantly, H1B holders are not permanent residents. It's very much a temporary. Most countries that are issuing travel bans exclude citizens and permanent residents.
Yes. I don't think it was a lie since it would needlessly create problems, but it was either the initial idea that was hastily revised after seeing the market reaction, or rank carelessness.
It's fun to joke about a politician's gaffes, and simple verbal slips are understandable - I noticed several in the speech but they were not substantive or significant. However, I think when drafting and reading a preapred statement on a topic of grave importance politicians have an obligation to say what they actually mean.
> There will be exemptions for Americans who have undergone appropriate screenings, and these prohibitions will not only apply to the tremendous amount of trade and cargo, but various other things as we get approval. Anything coming from Europe to the United States is what we are discussing. These restrictions will also not apply to the United Kingdom.
It reads a whole lot cleaner, i.e. like you would expect from a speech, if the statement about cargo was intended to say it was not prohibited.
My best guess is honestly that it was meant to be "these prohibitions will not apply to the" instead of "these prohibitions will not only apply to the". Inserting an extra "only" is a pretty easy mistake to make when reading text out loud.
[EDIT] Since the downvotes have started pouring in, I have to ask. Do you really attribute to this error to malice rather than stupidity? Given that the administration immediately (within minutes? edit: [0]yes, within minutes) made a correction I find it difficult to believe it was deliberate misinformation.
I mean, miscommunication happens. Trump didn't invent the plan, he was advised by others and gave the go-ahead. Then, his advisors drafted all of the details of the plan (probably in very short order). And of course, he didn't write the speech, someone prepared it for him. Afterward, the speech changed hands numerous times until some staff member loaded it into the prompter.
Someone definitely messed up, but it's hard for me to see how anyone could blame the speaker for this one. Assuming there's no partisanship, of course.
Not malice.. I attribute it to DOW futures dropping 400 points within minutes of him saying that. So they backtracked as quickly as possible.
But I also don't believe this speech would have happened tonight if it had been a up day on the stock market. I think that is the only lens they are looking at this through.
You can hire a whole team of perfectly competent people and all it takes is one slip-up to ship the wrong version of a file. I have no love for the administration, but I find it frustrating that people are so eager to attribute every single error, regardless of impact, to one name.
If you go back one administration and search 'Obama clarifies' on google, you find the same thing. Turns out that press machines involving dozens of people are prone to human error.
In a hypothetical world where our competent president and his competent staff made an occasional error, it would be reasonable to give the benefit of the doubt.
This is one of three or four errors just in this address alone. An address that may literally be the most important of his presidency. It wasn't just some George W. tripping over his words, he said literally the exact opposite of what the policy actually was and just kept rolling.
This is too important to be grading on a curve.
edit: To be clear I'm not suggesting he misread the teleprompter intentionally. I am saying that he and his administration have a level of incompetence and neglect that would result in jail time in many private industries.
I respect your position and the desire for professionalism. I differ in regard to the expectations of people, however. Even under the best of circumstances with the benefit of a lot of time (we don't have a clue about the intelligence that triggered this, so we don't know if they put this together in a day or a week) I still expect errors. Perhaps I'm cynical, but I just assume human beings will break things and screw up whenever they are given the opportunity. In the case of the white house press corps, there's a lot of opportunity for that.
That's why Obama had to issue immediate corrections regarding troop deployments, economy, and policies. There's too many moving parts.
I feel that this administration is actively hostile to the well-being of the United States, but I've been telling people since day 1 that it's counter productive to make fun of Trump and nit pick at every error regardless of how tiny or inconsequential. At the very best it diverts attention from the actual problems with this administration and at worst deepens into the political chasm we seem to have in this country.
a) This does not apply to US citizens or their family members[1].
b) This does not apply to cargo[2].
It appears that the President misspoke regarding point 2.
[1] https://www.dhs.gov/news/2020/03/11/homeland-security-acting....
[2] https://twitter.com/AnaSwanson/status/1237921160500830208