UNITED STATES

President Donald Trump’s executive order brought a 120-day suspension to America’s refugee program, and an indefinite end to its intake of Syrian refugees.

President Donald Trump has insisted that the U.S. would have been inundated by “bad dudes” if he had given any warning of his clampdown on visitors from terror-hit Muslim countries.

Mr Trump’s administration faces growing protests at home and abroad for closing the country to people from seven largely Muslim countries.

The abruptness of the executive order, which even the US Department of Homeland Security wasn’t warned about, has caused widespread chaos and confusion, with travellers left stranded at airports across the globe.

Mr Trump has, however, defended his decision and the way it was implemented. ‘If the ban were announced with a one-week notice, the “bad” would rush into our country during that week,’ he said on social media site Twitter.

The order, banning refugees from Syria and imposing a 90-day stop on most people from Iran, Iraq, Syria, Libya, Sudan, Somalia and Yemen from entering the US, has prompted protests across America and provoked strong condemnation from many world leaders.

Even Barack Obama broke with the tradition that former presidents do not criticise their successor to say he ‘fundamentally disagrees with the notion of discriminating against individuals because of their faith or religion.’

Mr Obama said he was ‘heartened by the level of engagement taking place in communities around the country’, saying it was ‘what we expect to see when American values are at stake’.

The US President justifies his travel ban and uses social media site Twitter to disseminate his message.

Amid reports that customs and immigration officials struggled to interpret the new rules, Mr Trump instead blamed the chaos at US airports on a Delta Airlines computer outage and the presence of protesters.

He added: ‘Only 109 people out of 325,000 people were detained and instead held for questioning.’

Mr Trump, who has also signed a new executive order to cut back on business red tape, insists that the travel ban and new vetting procedures will be very good for national security. He said: ‘We had to make the move some day, and we decided to make the move.’

Mr Trump was unrepentant as he said there was ‘nothing nice about searching for terrorists before they can enter our country’, telling sceptics to ‘study the world’.

Despite the British Foreign Secretary Boris Johnson insisting that British passport holders will escape the ban, the exemption doesn’t appear to have protected all UK citizens.

Lukman Faily, for instance, a former Iraqi ambassador to the US and a British passport holder after spending 20 years in the UK, planned to travel to Washington for a conference on fighting Islamic State.

Trump supporters claim he was badly served by inexperienced advisers who pushed the order through without consulting government departments on how to enforce it.

Blame has chiefly fallen on Stephen Miller, his 31-year-old former speech writer and now Mr Trump’s White House policy adviser.

Mr Miller has argued that the imposition of the ban has been an ‘efficient, orderly, enormously successful challenge’ to a ‘failed orthodoxy’ and was bound to attract protests. He has refused to say whether the US was soon planning to add other countries, such as Pakistan and Saudi Arabia, to the list.

Amid claims his order may breach the US constitution by targeting people on the basis of their religion, Mr Trump has insisted his travel ban is not anti-Muslim.

But German chancellor Angela Merkel said the fight against terrorism ‘does not in any way justify putting groups of certain people under general suspicion’.

And Guy Verhofstadt, the European Parliament’s Brexit negotiator, accused Mr Trump of working with far-Right groups on the continent to engineer the EU’s disintegration. He identified President Trump as one of three threats to the EU, along with radicalised political Islam and Vladimir Putin.