(Bloomberg) -- President Donald Trump on Monday signed a revised order restricting entry into the U.S. by people from six predominantly Muslim countries, reviving a signature initiative of his presidency that stalled in the face of court challenges and sparked global protests.
The measure was signed by Trump Monday morning, according to an administration official. Unlike previous executive actions he's taken, Trump wasn't scheduled to make a public appearance to highlight it. Instead, Secretary of State Rex Tillerson, Attorney General Jeff Sessions and Homeland Security Secretary John Kelly were set to deliver statements outlining the order.
The new directive removes Iraq from an original list of seven countries whose citizens cannot travel to the U.S. for the next 90 days. The order's scope will give more specifics about who is covered by restrictions on entering the U.S.
Legal permanent residents were always excluded from the entry ban, "but that's made much more clear now," Trump adviser Kellyanne Conway said Monday on Fox. “If you have travel docs, if you actually have a visa, if you are a legal permanent resident, you are not covered under this particular executive action.”
Trump has described the travel directive as an urgent national security matter but has repeatedly delayed issuing a revised order after a federal court blocked his original plan. It's now been more than a month since Trump's original order was issued.
The changes reflect a tacit acknowledgment by the White House that the first order, hastily implemented at the end of Trump's first week in office, was flawed, vulnerable to lawsuits and disruptive to thousands of travelers.
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The new travel ban is certain to trigger a fresh round of legal challenges, risking another blow to the administration's prestige as it tries to marshal political capital to win passage of an ambitious legislative agenda, including the repeal and replacement of the Obamacare health law, a rewrite of the tax code and a reordering of federal budget priorities to build up the military at the expense of domestic spending.
Conway said Iraq will no longer be a part of the 90-day travel ban that originally covered seven mostly Muslim nations in the Middle East and Africa. It's no longer on the list "based on their enhanced screening and reporting measures," she said.
The new order will also alter treatment of Syrian refugees, who had been banned indefinitely under the original order. They will now face the same 120-day ban as refugees from other countries, pending a review of screening procedures, Conway said.
The order will initially keep out citizens of Yemen, Syria, Iran, Sudan, Libya and Somalia for three months while the government determines whether people from those countries can be sufficiently vetted for terrorist sympathies.
--With assistance from Jennifer Jacobs
To contact the reporters on this story: Margaret Talev in Washington at mtalev@bloomberg.net, Jennifer Epstein in Washington at jepstein32@bloomberg.net.
To contact the editors responsible for this story: Craig Gordon at cgordon39@bloomberg.net, Elizabeth Wasserman, Elizabeth Titus
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