DOUG MCKELWAY: This is a law that Congress passed last December in the aftermath of the Paris and San Bernardino attacks. The Department of Homeland Security just announced, quite literally within the last hour or so, how it is going to be implemented. It will block from travel to the United States those European visa holders with dual citizenship to Iran, Iraq, Sudan, or Syria, or anybody who has been to those countries in the past five years. Waivers, however, can be granted on a case-by-case basis. It is very controversial, as you can imagine, in Iran, which says that it violates both the spirit and the letter of the nuke deal by potentially depriving from travel to the United States Iranian businessmen with legitimate business purposes here. But the broader issue of tightening visas as well as immigration and refugee settlement all coming to a head in Washington this week. Yesterday, Senate Democrats, for example, blocked a GOP bill already passed in the House that would require every incoming refugee from Iraq and Syria to be vetted by U.S. intelligence agencies. Senate Democrats tried to link this bill to Donald Trump's controversial views about a temporary ban on Muslims coming into the United States.
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MCKELWAY: Meanwhile Trump's call for a temporary ban on Muslims in this country, once decried by many critics as racist, seems not so racist to some of those critics in the aftermath of what happened in Cologne, Germany on New Years Eve when hundreds of women were sexual assaulted by people who, it turns out, many of them were recent refugees from the Middle East. Heather, back to you.
