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Donald Trump has banned citizens of 12 countries from entering the US and launched a probe into aides of Joe Biden for allegedly concealing his mental decline, in a sharp expansion of his anti-immigrant policies and retribution against his political foes.
The moves by Trump were part of a burst of actions announced by the White House late on Wednesday, marking a new divisive turn in his second term in office.
The sweeping ban on entry for foreign nationals from certain countries evoked the “Muslim ban” he introduced during his first term, while the probe into Biden and his aides followed through on his election campaign vows to investigate his predecessor.
Also on Wednesday evening, Trump renewed his assault on Harvard University, scrapping visas for foreign students looking to study at the elite institution.
The ban on entry into the US applies to nationals from Afghanistan, Chad, the Republic of the Congo, Equatorial Guinea, Eritrea, Haiti, Iran, Libya, Somalia, Sudan, Yemen and Myanmar — which the administration referred to as Burma. Citizens from those countries will be barred from coming into the US beginning on June 9, according to the proclamation the president signed on Wednesday.
Trump also partially restricted entry for citizens of Burundi, Cuba, Laos, Sierra Leone, Togo, Turkmenistan and Venezuela.
As with Trump’s first-term ban on entry for citizens of certain Muslim-majority countries, the restrictions are likely to face a range of legal challenges, which could affect their implementation.
Trump said the new ban would allow the US government to “protect its citizens from terrorist attacks and other national security or public-safety threats”.
In a video posted to his Truth Social platform late on Wednesday, Trump said more countries could be added to the list “as threats emerge around the world”, and nations could be removed if they made “material improvements” to their vetting processes.
He said an attack against the Jewish community in Boulder, Colorado, for which an Egyptian immigrant was charged and left 15 people injured at the weekend, “underscored the extreme dangers posed to our country by the entry of foreign nationals who are not properly vetted” or those who overstayed temporary visas.
“We don’t want them. We will not let what happened in Europe happen to America.”
Trump blamed Biden for such incidents, claiming his predecessor’s “open door policies” let in “millions of these illegals”. He also described his first-term ban as one of his administration’s “most successful policies”.
The probe into Biden was unveiled in a separate memo to attorney-general Pam Bondi, which was released by the White House. It said the White House counsel would investigate “whether certain individuals conspired to deceive the public about Biden’s mental state and unconstitutionally exercise the authorities and responsibilities of the President”.
The investigation follows the release of a book by journalists Jake Tapper and Alex Thompson that contains damaging revelations about Biden’s declining mental and physical acuity as he launched his ill-fated campaign for re-election.
Trump has fixated on allegations that staffers had Biden sign documents without his knowledge using electronic signatures or “the autopen”.
The White House memo said the probe would focus on “the policy documents for which the autopen was used, including clemency grants, Executive Orders, Presidential memoranda, or other Presidential policy decisions; and who directed that the President’s signature be affixed”.
Biden said in a statement on Wednesday he made the decisions during his presidency. “Any suggestion that I didn’t is ridiculous and false,” he said.
He added that Trump’s probe was “nothing more than a distraction by Donald Trump and Congressional Republicans who are working to push disastrous legislation that would cut essential programmes like Medicaid and raise costs on American families, all to pay for tax breaks for the ultra-wealthy and big corporations”.
