Trump lashes out at signs of rising opposition to travel ban

'Any negative polls are fake news, just like the CNN, ABC, NBC polls in the election,' the US president said on Twitter. 'Sorry, people want border security and extreme vetting.'

US president Donald Trump speaks during a visit to the US Central Command and Special Operations Command at MacDill Air Force Base on February 6, 2017 in Tampa, Florida. Mandel Ngan / AFP

WASHINGTON // US president Donald Trump lashed out on Monday at signs of rising public opposition to his controversial travel ban as tech giants threw their weight behind a push in federal courts to roll it back.

With the ban suspended since Friday, the legal battle has moved to San Francisco where a US court of appeals ordered the Trump administration to submit a brief on Monday defending the president’s January 27 decision.

The president’s travel restrictions, which were imposed via an executive order, denied entry to all refugees, as well as travellers from Iran, Iraq, Libya, Somalia, Sudan, Syria and Yemen.

During his first visit to to the headquarters of the US Central Command (Centcom) and US Special Operations Command (Socom) on Monday, Mr Trump vowed to allow into the United States people who “want to love our country”, in an apparent defence of his travel ban.

“We need strong programs” so that “people that love us and want to love our country and will end up loving our country are allowed in” and those who “want to destroy us and destroy our country” are kept out, he said without directly mentioning the case before the San Francisco appeals court.

“Freedom, security and justice will prevail,” he added. “We will defeat radical Islamic terrorism and we will not allow it to take root in our country. We’re not going to allow it.”

Despite initial public support, two new polls show that a majority of Americans now oppose the ban – findings Mr Trump angrily dismissed as media lies.

“Any negative polls are fake news, just like the CNN, ABC, NBC polls in the election,” he said on Twitter. “Sorry, people want border security and extreme vetting.”

Mr Trump, who spent the weekend at his Mar-a-Lago estate in Florida, is said to be increasingly frustrated with his staff's failure to contain the fallout from the ban's botched roll-out, which sparked chaos at US airports and drew international condemnation, the New York Times reported.

The order imposed a blanket ban on entry for nationals of the seven named countries for 90 days and barred all refugees for 120 days. Refugees from Syria were blocked indefinitely.

But on Friday, a federal district judge in Seattle ordered the temporary nationwide suspension of the president’s order, allowing the thousands of travellers who were suddenly barred from US soil to start trickling back in.

The attorneys general for the states of Washington and Minnesota, who filed the lawsuit that led to the temporary suspension, have asked the San Francisco appeals court to refuse to reinstate the ban.

Before now, they argued, no US president has imposed “a categorical bar on admission on a generalised (and unsupported) claim that some might engage in misconduct”.

“The order flouts Congress’s clear command prohibiting nationality-based discrimination,” they added.

In an additional blow, a long list of Silicon Valley giants led by Apple, Facebook, Google, Microsoft and Twitter filed a legal brief late on Sunday in support of the lawsuit.

The 97 companies speaking out against the travel ban said it harms recruiting and retention of talent, threatens business operations, and hampers their ability to attract investment to the United States.

The ban “inflicts significant harm on American business, innovation, and growth”, said the brief, whose backers also include Airbnb, Dropbox, eBay, Intel, Kickstarter, LinkedIn, Lyft, Mozilla, Netflix, PayPal, Uber and Yelp.

A group of prominent Democrats including former secretaries of state John Kerry and Madeleine Albright added their voices to the criticism on Monday, in a legal filing to the San Francisco appeals court.

“We view the order as one that ultimately undermines the national security of the United States, rather than making us safer,” they said.

“Reinstating the executive order would wreak havoc on innocent lives and deeply held American values.”

Specifically, the Democrats said Mr Trump’s ban could endanger US troops in the field, disrupt counterterrorism cooperation and feed ISIL propaganda.

Top Republicans have also shown renewed signs of discomfort with the new president, with Senate majority leader Mitch McConnell chiding Mr Trump on Sunday for attacking the judge who suspended the ban.

“I think it is best to avoid criticising judges individually,” he said.

Mr Trump had blasted judge James Robart in a series of angry tweets.

“Just cannot believe a judge would put our country in such peril. If something happens blame him and court system. People pouring in. Bad!,” he tweeted.

The appeals court in San Francisco on Sunday refused to overrule Mr Robart, and ordered the administration to present a brief by 11pm GMT on Monday.

Vice president Mike Pence called the setback “frustrating”.

“We will move very quickly,” he said on Sunday. “We are going to win the arguments because we will take the steps necessary to protect the country, which the president of the United States has the authority to do.”

At the Centcom and Socom headquarters on Monday, meanwhile, Mr Trump reaffirmed Washington’s “strong support” for Nato before military leaders and troops.

It follows his conversation on Sunday with Nato secretary general Jens Stoltenberg. A White House statement said the two “discussed how to encourage all Nato allies to meet their defence spending commitments”, as well as the crisis in Ukraine and security challenges facing Nato countries.

The president once dismissed the trans-Atlantic military alliance as “obsolete”, and said he would decide whether to protect Nato countries against Russian aggression based on whether those countries “have fulfilled their obligations to us”.

In a speech at the at the MacDill Air Force Base in Tampa, Florida, he warned ISIL “is on a campaign of genocide, committing atrocities across the world”.

“To these forces of death and destruction: America and its allies will defeat you,” said Mr Trump, who is also commander-in-chief of the military.

Centcom oversaw a recent raid by US special operations forces on an Al Qaeda compound in Yemen, the first military operation authorised by Mr Trump. A navy seal was killed, making him the first known US combat casualty under Trump.

Three other US service members were wounded in the operation. More than half a dozen suspected militants and more than a dozen civilians were also killed, including the eight-year-old daughter of Anwar Al Awlaki, a radical cleric and US citizen who was targeted and killed in 2011 by an American drone strike.

* Agence France-Presse and Associated Press