The order is expected to temporarily halt all refugee admissions without singling out Syrian refugees indefinitely. | Getty Source: Trump to exempt Iraq from revised travel ban

President Donald Trump plans to drop Iraq from the list of predominantly Muslim countries whose citizens are targeted in a revised travel ban to replace one halted by courts, a White House official who has seen the latest version of the order told POLITICO late Tuesday.

The revised order is also believed to temporarily halt all refugee admissions, but no longer single out Syrian refugees for an indefinite ban. And unlike the hastily signed original order, portions of which were suspended by multiple courts, the new version is not expected to affect green card holders or people already in possession of U.S. visas, the official said.


The official said the revised order was almost entirely finished, but it's still possible changes could still be made to the final version. The president initially said the new directive would be signed more than a week ago. It’s not clear whether the administration plans to rescind its original order or continue to defend it in court.

Trump had been scheduled to sign the new order Wednesday, but that plan was changed after his speech to Congress on Tuesday night. A senior administration official indicated the delay was born out of a desire to make sure the revised order gets plenty of attention. “We need [the executive order] to have its own time to breathe,” the official said.

“The new order is going to be very much tailored to what I consider to be a very bad decision, but we can tailor the order to that decision and get just about everything, in some ways more,” Trump said at a White House news conference earlier this month. “We have some of the best lawyers in the country working on it.”

The six countries still affected by the ban are Iran, Syria, Sudan, Yemen, Somalia and Libya.

The decision to drop Iraq, a major staging ground for the Islamic State terrorist group, could be largely political. The government of Iraq is technically an U.S. ally, and being listed alongside U.S. nemeses such as Iran and Syria is a sore point for relations.

When the 9th Circuit Court of Appeals unanimously upheld a nationwide block on key parts of the original order, Trump complained about judicial activism and vowed in a tweet shortly after the ruling “SEE YOU IN COURT, THE SECURITY OF OUR NATION IS AT STAKE!”

But rather than appealing to the Supreme Court, the White House has instead spent much of the nearly three weeks since trying to craft a new order that can withstand more than two dozen pending legal challenges by advocacy groups, including the ACLU. Those federal lawsuits are likely to be quickly redrafted to target the new order.

Excluding current visa holders could buttress the ban in court because those with existing ties to the U.S., such as students enrolled at American universities, are generally viewed as having more robust legal rights than prospective travelers who’ve never been to the United States.

In defending the previous ban, administration lawyers claimed that not immediately enacting stricter vetting measures on immigrants and travelers creates an imminent security risk in the U.S., but offered little tangible evidence to back up that view.

The White House directed the Department of Homeland Security, the Justice Department and various intelligence agencies to help build a legal foundation for the revamped executive order by demonstrating the seriousness of a potential security threat after the original order was blocked in court.

That order, issued only seven days after the president took office, placed a 90-day block on admission of citizens from Iran, Iraq, Libya, Somalia, Sudan, Syria and Yemen.

However, several judges who looked at the order questioned the factual basis for the selection of the seven targeted countries. Trump administration officials said the nations were on an Obama-era list adopted by Congress, but some terrorism experts noted that countries such as Saudi Arabia and Pakistan were omitted even though their national have been involved in terror attacks on U.S. soil.

Trump’s first travel ban directive also included a 120-day halt to all refugee admissions, indefinite suspension of the admission of Syrian refugees and preference for refugees who are members of persecuted religious minorities.

The travel moratorium sparked large protests and widespread chaos at the country's busiest airports as at least 60,000 visas were canceled.

Josh Gerstein and Eli Stokols contributed to this report.