The following is excerpted from an article appearing in Time.
The President has repeatedly used faulty data to invent national security justifications for flawed policy, including the Muslim Ban. In compliance with the President’s March 2017 executive order halting travel from six majority-Muslim countries, the Departments of Justice (DOJ) and Homeland Security (DHS) issued a report, rife with inaccuracies and methodological flaws, to create evidence justifying the ban by framing foreign-born people — including American citizens — as a “serious and persistent terror threat.”
But presidents, with all their power, can’t just make up facts. That’s why last year, the Brennan Center, Protect Democracy, and other groups filed a joint petition under the Information Quality Act, which requires all federal agencies to adhere to certain standards of “quality, objectivity, utility, and integrity” when providing information to the public.
We argued that the report artificially inflated the threat of foreign-born terrorism, in part by excluding all instances of domestic terrorism from its analysis. The report also cherry-picked eight unrepresentative cases of Muslim men as “illustrative examples” of the 402 foreign-born individuals convicted of international terrorism-related charges.
To read the full article, click here.
(Image: Alex Wong/Getty)