A Molotov cocktail attack on a group of Jewish rally-goers gathered in Boulder, Colo., was a stark reminder of the growing security threats facing Americans, particularly Jews. The attacker, Mohamed Sabry Soliman, is an Egyptian national who overstayed his visa in 2023. In response, U.S. President Donald Trump issued a new executive order that imposes travel restrictions on nationals from nearly 20 countries.
In the order issued on June 4, Trump made his rationale clear: national security. He stated that he “must act to protect the national security and national interest of the United States and its people.” The order explains that the countries impacted by the order must improve information-sharing and identity-management procedures, and that nationals from some of those countries “pose significant risks of overstaying their visas.” Until those “identified inadequacies” are addressed, the president explained, the travel restrictions will remain in place.
The mainstream media and many on the political left are up in arms, once again. We’ve seen this movie before. During his first term, Trump issued a similar executive order, which the U.S. Supreme Court upheld in 2018. Writing for the majority, Chief Justice John Roberts stated, “The Proclamation is expressly premised on legitimate purposes: preventing entry of nationals who cannot be adequately vetted and inducing other nations to improve their practices.” The new travel ban appears to follow that opinion closely.
Still, critics remain loud. Of course, these are the same voices who applauded the lower court rulings against Trump’s first travel ban. The intellectual dishonesty is tiresome.
The train has left the station, however. The president has made clear that he will restore national security to our nation’s borders. Remember, President Joe Biden opened the border, leading to roughly 10 million illegal immigrants entering the country during his term, a number that is higher than even the total population of New York, which has just over 8 million people and is the largest city in the United States. Americans across the spectrum have called for the borders to be closed, and Trump has done so. Border encounters are now at their lowest level in 25 years. The travel ban is a natural extension of this approach.
One of the main reasons Americans are fed up with record illegal crossings is the growing concern for their safety. Those concerns are legitimate. If there are no meaningful controls in place, criminals and terrorists will inevitably cross alongside those simply seeking a better life. This is a reality that even critics can’t dismiss. There have been far too many high-profile attacks by illegal immigrants, including the murder of Laken Riley in Georgia, Jocelyn Nungaray in Texas, Rachel Morin in Maryland and others. Each of these horrific incidents reminded the public and the Trump administration that open border policies have consequences.
Soliman, the Egyptian national who traveled to Boulder to terrorize a group of Jews who were walking to bring awareness to the innocent civilians being held hostage in Gaza, is yet another example of things having gone too far. Enough is enough. As Trump stated last week, that attack “underscores the danger posed to our country by foreign nationals not properly vetted, as well as those who come here as temporary visitors and overstay their welcome … . We don’t want ’em.”
This, coupled with the administration’s aggressive efforts to combat antisemitism on college campuses and to prosecute hate crimes targeting the Jewish community, such as the murder last month of Yaron Lischinsky and Sarah Milgrim outside the Capital Jewish Museum in Washington, D.C., should demonstrate Trump’s clear commitment to standing up for the American Jewish community.
In an article in The Washington Post about the travel ban and how the Jewish community is responding, the head of the Reform movement’s political arm, the Religious Action Center of Reform Judaism, flippantly said, “Jews are not asking for this. This is not what Jews need or what keeps us safe.”
The rabbi is woefully mistaken. With antisemitic attacks at unbearable levels in our country, American Jews expect our government to protect us from those who wish to attack us. Is that too much to ask? In fact, the first and foremost obligation of a government is to protect its people. If our government cannot properly vet individuals migrating from those countries, then they should be banned from entering the United States until there can be proper vetting and information sharing, as the president’s order states. The rabbi’s opposition to the travel ban is a political reflex from a group that seems to embrace the “progressive” left’s version of social justice over our own Jewish identity and values.
To be fair, our legal immigration system is utterly broken and must be fixed. We need a real solution for the millions of undocumented, illegal immigrants already in our country. We need to fix the asylum process so that claims can be resolved swiftly and fairly, prioritizing real claims and penalizing fabricated ones. We need to revamp and vastly improve pathways for legal visas. We need to expand and expedite work visas and guest worker programs. But first, we must secure the border. We must stop the flow of migrants from nations where migrants cannot be properly vetted. And while the flow of illegal immigration can be mostly stemmed by executive action, fixing the legal immigration system is a legislative task that lies with Congress, which seems impossible in today’s divided and sometimes dysfunctional legislature.
Not long ago, the importance of having secure borders seemed to be a noncontroversial, bipartisan position. As President Bill Clinton said in his 1995 State of the Union address, all Americans are “rightly disturbed by the large number of illegal aliens entering our country. … That’s why our administration has moved aggressively to secure our borders … .”
It was true then, and it’s even more true now. Let’s try, for once, to set aside political oppositional reflexes and applaud the president’s efforts to secure our country’s borders and protect our nation, including the American Jewish community.