WASHINGTON (CN) - President Donald Trump took another stab at a travel ban Monday, signing a new executive order that will "temporarily pause" immigration of nationals from six Muslim-majority countries for 90 days and suspend refugee admissions for 120 days.
The new ban is narrower in scope than the old one, but will still tighten security measures for travelers from countries the administration deems a terror threat - Syria, Iran, Yemen, Libya, Somalia and Sudan.
"Each of these countries is a state sponsor of terrorism, has been significantly compromised by terrorist organizations, or contains active conflict zones," the new executive order states.
"Any of these circumstances diminishes the foreign government's willingness or ability to share or validate important information about individuals seeking to travel to the United States," it continues.
But critics of the new ban say the current vetting process is rigorous enough to have prevented instability in those countries from posing a genuine national security threat, and has been successful in stopping would-be terrorists from entering the country.
"The crux of the order is the same, which is to prevent the entry into the United States of visitors and would-be immigrants from six - not seven now but six - majority Muslim countries," Elizabeth Goitein, co-director of the Liberty and National Security Program at the Brennan Center for Justice said in a phone interview.
From her perspective, the new immigration order is simply "Muslim Ban 2.0."
"This travel ban is being ordered without any evidence of any particularly heightened threat coming from visitors from those countries," she said.
Indeed, the new order removes Iraq from the list of banned countries, even though it specifically sites an instance of two Iraqi nationals admitted as refugees who the U.S. government convicted of terrorism-related charges.
However, the government arrested the men for trying to funnel money to al-Qaida in Iraq, and help the terror group conduct attacks on American troops there. The two did not plot an attack on U.S. soil.
The new travel ban also notes that the government has arrested a Somali man on terrorism charges who came here with his parents as a refugee. But Goitein said the FBI ensnared him in a sting operation, convincing the man to agree to help in an agency-concocted plot to blow up a building in Portland, Oregon.
"The fact that these were the best examples the administration could come up with really shows that there is a dearth of any evidence supporting a national security justification for this order," Goitein said.
The text of the new executive order claims that "hundreds of persons born abroad have been convicted of terrorism-related crimes in the United States," and claims that the FBI is investigating more than 300 people who came to the U.S. as refugees in counter-terrorism investigations.
However, the Associated Press reported last month that a leaked 3-page Department of Homeland Security report had determined that insufficient evidence exists to support the president's claims that citizens of these countries post a national security risk to the U.S.
The agency verified the authenticity of the report, but has since said it was not a comprehensive report.