Former Secretary of State Madeleine Albright is slamming President’s Trump’s travel ban as reckless and “flat anti-American.”
“We are a country that has been created and populated by people from other countries,” she told CNN’s Chris Cuomo on Tuesday. “The Statue of Liberty’s message is in fact one of open arms and welcoming people, and I do think that there are tears in the eyes of the statue at the moment.”
Albright slammed the chaotic way the travel ban was implemented, calling it “the most unprepared plan that I have ever seen in terms of the lack of coordination with other parts of the government.”
She said the sudden ban has “created more danger because there are countries that are now, in fact, not able to cooperate with us in terms of intelligence sharing.” She also said she feared the ban may create mistrust among foreign governments “and there’s going to be tit for tat.”
President Trump signed an executive order Friday to keep refugees from entering the country for 120 days and to ban immigrants from seven predominantly Muslim nations for three months. The ban caused confusion at US airports when green card holders and people with valid visas, including Iraqi interpreters who had helped the US Army, were detained for hours.
Albright, who served as Secretary of State under President Clinton, questioned the reasoning behind the administration’s ban, saying it is “not based on facts” and “made up of various statements that don’t make any sense.”
She told Cuomo the US is committed to diversity and that “blaming a whole religion for this is truly outrageous and un-American.”
“Disruption is interesting, Chris, (but) destruction is bad,” she said. “It would be useful if the people at the top of our government actually read the Constitution.”