Sayfullo Saipov, an Uzbek national, killed at least eight people with a truck in New York yesterday. Uzbekistan is a central Asian country north of Afghanistan of almost 30 million people—88 percent of whom are Muslim. President Trump did not include Uzbeks in his travel ban released last month, but he is already sounding bellicose, writing that he will not allow ISIS to “enter our country” and that he “ordered Homeland Security to step up our already Extreme Vetting Program,” a phrase which he sometimes uses as shorthand for the travel ban.
But adding Uzbekistan to the travel ban would be unwise for a president whose administration has guided him toward adopting a very specific strategy to defend the ban: that the governments of the banned nationalities fail to meet certain criteria relating to identity management, information sharing, and terrorist activity in their country. As I explained in a post last month, the president did not apply the criteria in any objective way, banning some countries that meet the criteria while not banning many other countries that fail them. But adding yet another country that he himself said just a month ago meets the criteria would further expose the travel ban criteria as the sham that they are.
Uzbekistan does not fail the travel ban criteria that the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) created to justify the ban. Here are the nine travel ban criteria grouped into the three DHS categories: