Trump is considering expanding the cruel and unnecessary travel ban to include as many as seven more countries. Nahal Toosi reports:

President Donald Trump may expand his controversial travel ban with an announcement expected as early as Monday, the three-year anniversary of the original order, which targeted several majority-Muslim nations.

The list of countries is not yet final and could be changed, but nations under consideration for new restrictions include Belarus, Myanmar (also known as Burma), Eritrea, Kyrgyzstan, Nigeria, Sudan and Tanzania, according to two people familiar with the matter.

A draft being considered by the Trump administration would place immigration restrictions on the additional seven countries, but not necessarily completely ban all citizens of those nations from entering the United States.

Nonetheless, any new restrictions are likely to strain ties with the affected countries, some of which assist the U.S. on issues like fighting terrorism, and some of which Washington has been trying to court for strategic reasons.

Like the first three versions of the ban, an expanded ban doesn’t have any legitimate security justification. The expanded list is even more bizarre than the first group of states. There isn’t even a remotely plausible connection to terrorism in most of these countries, and in those countries where there are jihadist groups the governments are partners with the U.S. in combating them. Placing additional restrictions on people from Nigeria and Tanzania is likely to interfere with the work of humanitarian and religious groups. Adding these countries to the list is just going to damage U.S. relations with all of them in exchange for nothing. The expanded list doesn’t do much to counter the criticism that the travel ban is directed against predominantly Muslim countries since Muslims make up a large part of the population in most of the countries on the new list as well.

This ban is the worst kind of security theater that ends up penalizing innocent ordinary people from the targeted countries while doing nothing to make the U.S. the slightest bit more secure. The fact is that the U.S. is already extraordinarily secure from terrorist threats from overseas. In this case, national security is just being invoked to provide cover for creating unnecessary barriers to visitors from these countries.

The current travel ban has no merit, and expanding it makes no sense. We have already seen over the last three years how much harm the travel ban has done to thousands and thousands of families who have been separated by the president’s decree, and it is practically guaranteed that an expanded version will cause more misery and hardship to many thousands more from the countries that are added to it. The travel ban needs to be rescinded, not expanded.