Canadian Schools Halt Trips to U.S. Due to Trump Travel Ban

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by Micah J. Fleck

According to Time:

Canada’s largest school board is not happy with President Donald Trump’s travel bans.

The Toronto District School Board said Thursday it was stopping any new school trips to the U.S. until further notice, citing “uncertainty” around who may be impacted by the U.S. President’s executive orders.

After federal judges blocked Trump’s first executive order banning travelers from seven Muslim-majority countries as well as Syrian refugees, he issued a second order targeting fewer countries, which a judge in Hawaii blocked as well. However, Trump has said he will fight the latest ruling and called the halt an “unprecedented judicial overreach.”

Twenty-four school trips already scheduled to come to the U.S. will go ahead, the school said. But if students with appropriate documentation are denied entry, the whole trip will stop with them.

The Toronto District School Board consists of 246,000 students in 584 schools throughout Toronto, making this a high-profile move. But a few other schools have made similar choices, according to the BBC, and the Girl Guides of Canada recently said they were canceling all trips to the U.S.

The school district’s director of education John Malloy said this was a “difficult decision” and explained the school board wanted to balance its commitment to “equity and inclusion” with the financial losses that would occur if it canceled already scheduled trips.

President Trump’s increasingly narrowing stance on immigration and visa application processes via his various travel ban and screening propositions has made multiple entities nervous, but the Toronto school district is just the latest.

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