Trump took a lot of heat over the weekend when several Green Card holders were detained before they could gain re-entry into the country. Well it appears now that the executive order will not apply to Green Card holders:
TPM – Department of Homeland Security Secretary John Kelly on Sunday issued a statement declaring that the executive order temporarily barring visitors from seven predominantly Muslim countries will not apply to U.S. residents with greed cards.
“In applying the provisions of the president’s executive order, I hereby deem the entry of lawful permanent residents to be in the national interest,” Kelly said in a statement. “Accordingly, absent the receipt of significant derogatory information indicating a serious threat to public safety and welfare, lawful permanent resident status will be a dispositive factor in our case-by-case determinations.”
Apparently the executive order itself did not change:
The same anonymous senior administration official told reporters on Sunday night that “nothing has changed” from the statement he’d issued on Saturday about needing a “waiver,” blaming the confusion on “a semantic debate about the meaning of the word ‘exemption,'” fed by CNN. “It really is a massive success story in terms of implementation on every single level,” the senior administration official said of the executive order.
Kellyanne Conway said something very similar this morning:
Senior Trump adviser Kellyanne Conway on Monday said the green card guidelines were not altered but needed clarification. “It wasn’t a rollback,” she said on CNBC.