Washington, DC – Civil rights advocates in the United States are raising the alarm over a directive signed by President Donald Trump that they say lays the groundwork for another travel ban targeting Muslim-majority countries.

The executive order, released on Monday, may also be used to target foreign nationals who are already in the US legally and crack down on international students who advocate for Palestinian rights, experts say.

Deepa Alagesan, a lawyer at the International Refugee Assistance Project (IRAP), an advocacy group, said the new order is “bigger and worse” than the “xenophobic” travel ban that Trump imposed on several Muslim-majority countries in 2017 during his first term.

“The worst part of it now, it’s looking to not just ban people outside the US entering the US, but also to use these same rationales as a basis to get people out of the US,” Alagesan told Al Jazeera.

The new order directs administration officials to compile a list of nations “for which vetting and screening information is so deficient as to warrant a partial or full suspension on the admission of nationals from those countries”.

It goes further, however. It calls for identifying the number of citizens who entered the US from those countries since 2021 — during Joe Biden’s presidency — and collecting “relevant” information about their “actions and activities”.

The White House then orders “immediate steps” to deport foreign citizens from those countries “whenever information is identified that would support the exclusion or removal”.

Trump’s executive order also says the administration must ensure that foreign citizens, including those in the US, “do not bear hostile attitudes” towards American citizens, culture or government and “do not advocate for, aid, or support designated foreign terrorists”.

Advocates call order ‘scary’

Alagesan warned that the decree, dubbed “Protecting the United States from Foreign Terrorists and Other National Security and Public Safety Threats”, could inflict more harm on immigrant families than the 2017 travel restrictions, known collectively as the “Muslim ban”.

She said the order’s vague language is “scary” because it appears to give US agencies broad authority to recommend actions against people whom the administration seeks to target.

“At its core, it’s just another method to keep people out, to get people out, to break up families, to incite fear, to make sure that people know that they are not welcome and that the government will bring its force to bear against them,” Alagesan told Al Jazeera.

Other advocacy groups have also decried the order since its publication.

The American-Arab Anti-Discrimination Committee (ADC) said the decree goes further than the 2017 “Muslim ban” by giving the government “wider latitude to use ideological exclusion” to deny visas and remove people from the US.

“ADC calls on the Trump administration to stop stigmatizing and targeting entire communities, which only sows division,” the group said in a statement.

“America’s promise of freedom of speech and expression — a principle that President Trump himself has long highlighted — now stands in stark contradiction to his new executive order.”

The Muslim Public Affairs Council also cautioned in a statement that enhancing vetting measures for specific countries risks “functioning as a de facto Muslim ban under the guise of security protocols”.

Maryam Jamshidi, a professor at the University of Colorado Law School, said the order appears to revive the travel ban from Trump’s first term, while pushing a right-wing agenda in the broader culture wars.

Parts of the decree also specifically target Palestinians and Palestinian rights supporters, Jamshidi added.

“The right is very invested in continuing this notion that foreigners, people who are Black, brown, Muslim — not white Judeo-Christian, effectively — are threatening ‘real Americans’.”

‘Ugliest possible action’

In 2018, several US media outlets reported that Trump told aides the US should admit more immigrants from places like Norway rather than people from Haiti, El Salvador and African nations, which he called “s***hole countries”.

Many right-wing politicians — including Trump’s current vice president, JD Vance — have embraced the “great replacement” conspiracy theory, which posits that there is an effort to replace native-born Americans with immigrants.

Trump’s recent order warns against foreign nationals in the US seeking to undermine or replace American culture.

Still, experts say it is unlikely to be used as a mass deportation vehicle.

“It gives marching orders to the agencies to basically use the full extent of legal frameworks and loopholes to take the ugliest possible action to remove people that the president has decided he doesn’t want here,” Alagesan said.

“That said, there are still laws limiting the grounds on which someone can be removed, and there are protections available to people who are in deportation proceedings.”

Jamshidi also said it is not clear how the order would go about deporting people, noting that it is not established whether the immigration law cited gives the administration authority to remove foreign nationals.

The decree relies on a section of the Immigration and Nationality Act that gives the president power to restrict entry to the US for “any class of aliens” — but not to remove people already here.

“This is probably not a blanket deportation charge,” Jamshidi said.

But she warned that the order could lead to further scrutiny against people from those countries and deter political activities — especially Palestinian solidarity — that could be perceived as running afoul of the administration’s guidelines.

Efforts to deport student activists

The order directs US officials to make recommendations to “protect” citizens from foreign nationals “who preach or call for sectarian violence, the overthrow or replacement of the culture on which our constitutional Republic stands, or who provide aid, advocacy, or support for foreign terrorists”.

Jamshidi said the language is “certainly about foreign nationals, including foreign students who are participating in Palestine advocacy”.

With pro-Israel politicians often calling campus activists “pro-Hamas”, Jamshidi said Trump’s edict could be used to target Palestinian rights advocates who are in the US on student visas.

Both Trump and Secretary of State Marco Rubio have previously called for deporting international students.

As Palestinian solidarity protests swept the country’s universities following the outbreak of the war on Gaza, Israel’s supporters, especially Republicans, painted student demonstrators as a threat to campus safety.

Rubio led a Senate letter to the Biden administration in October 2023, calling for the removal of international students who participated in protests in support of Palestinians.

The letter drew parallels between student protesters and the 9/11 attackers. It cited “lessons learned on September 11, 2001, when terrorists, many of whom were studying in the United States or had overstayed visas, carried out the deadliest attack on American soil”.

“Sadly, twenty-two years later, our country is witnessing public displays from terrorist sympathizers taking to the streets and condoning Hamas’ brutal attacks against the State of Israel,” the letter read.

The 2024 Republican Party platform also calls for deporting “pro-Hamas radicals” to make college campuses “safe and patriotic again”.

‘Broader implications’

Dima Khalidi, director of the advocacy group Palestine Legal, said it is “clear” that Trump’s recent executive order was crafted to specifically target Palestinian rights supporters.

She added that, while the decree does not specify Israel, pro-Israel groups have been trying to portray criticism of the US ally as not just anti-Israel or even anti-Semitic but as “un-American”.

“We have to connect it to this order to the broader ideological imposition that’s happening and part of the larger purging that Trump seems very intent on carrying out,” Khalidi told Al Jazeera.

She said the Trump administration is seeking to use the broad discretion in immigration law to crack down on Palestinian rights supporters because of their views and circumvent free speech rights.

“They are really painting a picture for people of what is acceptable, what is not; what is American, what is not; what is patriotic, what is not,” Khalidi told Al Jazeera.

Critics say the bottom line is that, while Trump’s first “Muslim ban” targeted travellers from several Muslim-majority countries, this order has farther-reaching consequences, including about what it means to be an American.

For example, the decree calls for measures to ensure the “proper assimilation” of immigrants and “promote a unified American identity”.

Jamshidi said the order has “broader implications for all sorts of groups than the initial iterations of the Muslim ban”.

“It’s another salvo in the right’s culture wars,” she told Al Jazeera.