The State Department said Friday that fewer than 60,000 people had their visas provisionally canceled after President Trump’s executive order blocked them from traveling to the US.
That figure contradicts a Justice Department lawyer’s statement earlier Friday during a hearing in a Virginia courtroom that 100,000 had been revoked.
The State Department clarified that the higher figure included diplomatic and other visas that were actually exempted by the travel ban, as well as expired visas.
Trump’s order bans travel for people from Iran, Iraq, Syria, Sudan, Somalia, Libya and Yemen.
Attorney Erez Reuveni, from the Office of Immigration Litigation at the Civil Division of the Justice Department, also said no returning legal permanent residents — those with green cards — had been turned away.
The judge extended a temporary restraining order against removing lawful permanent residents until next Friday.
The higher number came out during a hearing in a lawsuit filed by lawyers for two Yemeni brothers who arrived at Dulles International Airport last Saturday.
They were coerced into giving up their immigrant visas, they argued, and were quickly put on a return flight to Ethiopia.
Judge Leonie M. Brinkema, who presided over the case of 9/11 conspirator Zacarias Moussaoui, said she’d never seen so much interest in a legal dispute as she has over Trump’s order.
“I have never had so much public outpouring as I’ve seen in this case,” she said, The Washington Post reported.
“This order touched something in the United States that I’ve never seen before. It’s amazing.”
She also slammed the ruling, while acknowledging that Trump’s executive powers gave him near total control of the borders.
“It’s quite clear that not all the thought went into it that should have gone into it,” Brinkema said.
“There has been chaos . . . without any kind of actual hard evidence that there is a need” to revoke visas already granted.
Brinkema said she would not hold government employees in contempt for how they handled travelers from seven banned countries over the weekend because she didn’t have enough evidence to make that call.
Virginia lawmakers charged that Customs and Border Protection officers ignored the judge’s order last weekend that immigrants had to have access to lawyers.
With AP
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