WASHINGTON, D.C. (The Adobo Chronicles, Washington Bureau) – After a stinging loss at the 9th Circuit Court of Appeals on Friday, President Donald Trump announced that he is going back to the drawing board and will issue a new travel ban Executive Order shortly.
While Trump’s announcement is not surprising — considering the fact that he is a man that does not take defeat lightly — what shocked even his close advisers is that he is including a non-Muslim country in the new order. That country is the Dominican Republic.
Large-scale migration from the Caribbean country to the United States began in the 1960s, in the wake of economic and political turbulence that occurred after dictator Rafael Trujillo was killed by rebels in 1961 and the U.S. military and other government agencies intervened.
As of 2012, it is estimated that 960,000 immigrants from the Dominican Republic resided in the United States, constituting 2 percent of the total U.S. foreign-born population of 40.8 million.
But the number of immigrants has nothing to do with Trump’s new draft order. Rather, it is in retaliation for a Dominican Republic front-page newspaper article about the U.S. and Israel.
The photos of both Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and Trump appeared in that article in El Nacional. Alas, the paper used a photo of Saturday Night Live’s (SNL) Alec Baldwin impersonating the U.S. president.
Upon seeing a copy of the newspaper, Trump was reportedly mad as hell. So he decided to include The Dominican Republic among the new countries in his new travel ban which will focus not on religion but on national security.