Donald Trump’s executive order to close America’s borders to refugees and immigrants from seven Muslim-majority countries has been swiftly enforced. The order blocks to the US from citizens from Iran, Iraq, Syria, Yemen, Sudan, Libya for 90 days and as well as indefinitely suspending admission of Syrian refugees.
The 45th president of the US also had a big day as he took phone calls from major world leaders including the Russian president, Vladimir Putin. Meanwhile Theresa May has met with the Turkish president, Recep Tayyip Erdoğan, and a joint press conference was held.
Here’s a roundup of the key events of the day:
Criticism of his “muslim ban” came in from all quarters including Madeline Albright, the former US secretary of state, Malala Yousafzai, the Pakistani campaigner for girls’ education and Facebook’s chief executive, Mark Zuckerberg.
We received the first reports of arrivals blocked at US airports.
The National Iranian American Council (NIAC) described the executive order as worse than a draft form that had been leaked earlier in the week.
Twelve nobel laureates are among thousands of signatories to a petition calling on Trump to renounce the order.
A legal challenge has been filed against Donald Trump’s executive order by lawyers representing two Iraqi refugees.
Theresa May and the Turkish president, Recep Tayyip Erdoğan, have signed a £100m commitment to build new fighter jets.
May refused to condemn Trump’s refugee ban when pressed on the issue by journalists at a joint press conference.
People holding so-called green cards, making them legal permanent US residents, are included in the executive action.
Iran vowed to take reciprocal action.
Trump spoke to Angela Merkel, the German chancellor, and the Russian president, Vladimir Putin.
We spoke to travellers who had been turned away from flights and those who don’t know when they will see their families again
Thank you so much for staying with us throughout the day and contributing your stories via our callout. We’re closing the live blog now, but will of course be publishing further stories on today’s events.
Hamaseh Tayari, a UK resident who holds an Iranian passport, has been on holiday in Costa Rica with her boyfriend for the last week. She was due to fly back to Glasgow, where she works as a vet, this morning but was denied entry onto the flight because her flight went via New York and she would need a transit visa, which was revoked.
Tayari, who grew up in Italy, has never experienced anything like this. She says: “This has really shocked me. We just discovered [what Trump did] at the airport when we went to check in. I want people to know that this is not just happening to refugees. I am a graduate and I have a PhD. It has happened to a person who is working and who pays tax.”
Hamaseh Tayari. Photograph: Hamaseh Tayari
Tayari and her boyfriend are trying to find an alternative route home. A flight to Madrid on the 30 January will cost them £2,000 and they’ll still have to find a way from there to Glasgow. “We had been saving for months for this holiday and it will cost me a month’s salary just to get home,” she said.
“I am destroyed. I did not know that I could cry for so long. It feels like the beginning of the end. How this is possible? I am really afraid about what is going on.”
Trump’s conversation with Putin, which began about noon eastern standard time (EST), took place as the president faces pressure to maintain sanctions against Moscow. Trump has previously spoken about the need to repair the US-Russian relationship, which has been particularly tense in recent years.
President Donald Trump, accompanied by his inner circle, speaks on the phone with the Russian president, Vladimir Putin. Photograph: Andrew Harnik/AP
Trump spoke with Putin from the Oval Office and was flanked by vice-president Pence, national security adviser Michael Flynn, White House chief-of-staff Reince Priebus, chief strategist Stephen K. Bannon and Sean Spicer, his press secretary.
We’ll update you when we receive official statements about the content of the call from the Kremlin and the White House.
Dutch airline KLM says it has had to turn away seven would-be passengers because they would no longer have been accepted into the US under Trump’s ban on immigration from seven Muslim-majority nations.
Manel Vrijenhoek, at KLM’s press office, said: “We would love to bring them there. That’s not the problem. It’s just that this is what the US sprang on the rest of the world that these people are no longer welcome.”
She said the seven were due to fly with KLM from different airports around the world. Vrijenhoek said she had no specifics on their nationalities. She confirmed they were from countries affected by the three-month immigration ban: Iraq, Syria, Iran, Sudan, Libya, Somalia and Yemen.
Meanwhile, Air Canada is reportedly blocking any travellers with passports from the seven countries from boarding flights to the US:
News: Air Canada says anyone with passport from Iran, Iraq, Libya, Somalia, Sudan, Syria, Yemen CANNOT take flight to US, green card or not.
Murtadha Al-Tameemi, 24 is a software engineer for Facebook from Iraq who lives and works in Seattle. He was in Canada when he got a “frantic call” from his immigration attorney telling him to immediately cross the border back into the US.
Tameemi’s family lives just three hours away in Vancouver but he doesn’t know when he’ll see them again. “I have been traveling back and forth between the US and Canada on almost weekly basis for a few years,” he says. “I was in Vancouver to attend the opening night of my little brother’s first play when I got the call but there was no way I was going to miss that.
“I didn’t want to make a big deal because it was a happy night for our family but I told my mum the situation and that I didn’t know when I would see her again. She told me everything is going to be all right and that it would all work out.”
After the play he rushed to the airport. “I showed up five hours before my flight this morning to race against any executive order and get through immigration before the potential ban could take effect,” he said.
Tameemi, who first came to the US as an exchange student, also had to cancel a planned business trip to Africa. “It certainly doesn’t feel like the America that welcomed me 10 years ago with open arms and hearts.”
Donald Trump is now on the phone to Russian president Vladamir Putin, the White House press secretary has confirmed.
The US president had been scheduled to speak to several world leaders today, including Francois Hollande of France and Angela Merkel of Germany.
After speaking with Chancellor Merkel for 45 minutes @POTUS is now onto his 3rd of 5 head of government calls, speaking w Russian Pres Putin pic.twitter.com/RPAWIgcO2C
Washington is responsible for its policy on refugees, Theresa May told reporters, when asked about Trump’s ban on people from certain countries seeking refuge in the US.
May made the comment at a joint news conference with Turkish prime minister, Binali Yildirim, in Ankara, the Turkish capital. May had previously said that the special relationship between the United States and Britain meant that the two countries could speak frankly when they disagreed.
Theresa May and Turkish prime minister Binali Yildirim take part in a press conference in Ankara, Turkey. Photograph: Christopher Furlong/Getty Images
Trump’s executive order has prompted fury from Arab travellers in the Middle East and north Africa who said it was humiliating and discriminatory. It drew widespread criticism from western allies including France and Germany, Arab-American advocacy groups and human rights organisations.
Iran has condemned its inclusion alongside six other predominantly Muslim countries in the US visa ban as an “open affront against the Muslim world and the Iranian nation” and vowed to retaliate.
A foreign ministry statement carried by state media said Iran “would take appropriate consular, legal and political measures” against the ban, which was announced by Trump on Friday.
“The decision by the United States to impose travel restrictions on Muslims – even if it is limited to three months – is an explicit insult to the Muslim world, particularly the great people of Iran,” the statement read, according to the semi-official Tasnim news agency.
“Instead of countering terrorism and protecting American people, these measures will be written in history as a gift to extremists and their supporters.”
Tehran said it was watching developments on the visa bans closely. “We respect people of America and we differentiate between them and their government but because of supporting the rights of our citizens and until these insulting restrictions have been lifted, we [will] reciprocate.”
Also on Saturday, Iran’s president, Hassan Rouhani, said: “Today is not the time of wall-raising between nations. Have they forgotten that the Berlin Wall collapsed years ago?”
According to Press TV, Rouhani added: “Today’s world is not a world where one can create distances between the nations and peoples of different territories. Today is a day of neighbourhood. We have become neighbours in cultural, scientific and civilisational terms, and also the world of communications and communications technology have shrunk distances … No one can fight globalisation today.”
Iraqi soldiers - who have been backed by US-led air support, training and other assistance - have decried Trump’s travel restrictions, AFP reports.
In Mosul, where Iraqi forces are at the forefront of the war against jihadists, soldiers told reporters the move would prevent them from visiting their families.
“It’s not fair, it’s not right. I should have the right to visit my family,” said Assem Ayad, a 23-year-old soldier deployed in Mosul who has three cousins living in Texas.
“This decision was made because there are terrorist groups in Iraq. But there are also innocent people” including those who are fighting against jihadists, said Ayad, who carried an American-made assault rifle.
Haider Hassan, 45, another soldier in Mosul, said his cousin lives in the United States and that he had wanted to visit.
Referring to US military personnel deployed in Iraq, Hassan asked: “Why would they ban us from coming to America when they are in my country and have bases here?”
Isis overran large areas north and west of Baghdad in 2014, sweeping aside military and police units that were ill-prepared to combat the offensive.
Theresa May has ducked a series of questions on Donald Trump’s migrant and refugee ban, according to reporters at the scene of a joint press conference with the Turkish PM.
The prime minister had travelled to Turkey to meet with the country’s leaders just 24 hours after holding a joint press conference with the new US president in a bid to cement the UK-US special relationship.
She was asked on more than one occasion what she thought of Trump’s executive order temporarily banning refugees from seven predominantly Muslim countries.
After first ducking the question, she said: “The United States is responsible for the United State policy on refugees.”
Here’s the Guardian’s political editor Heather Stewart:
May ducked question about Trump's refugee ban. Asked again, she tetchily replies: "The US is responsible for the US policy on refugees."
Abas Aslani at Iranian news agency, Tasnim, says the Iranian Ministry of Foreign Affairs (MFA) has said it will apply a reciprocal measure against US visas - via my colleague Saeed Kamali Dehghan.
#Iran MFA: Iran, while respecting American ppl & distinguishing them from govmnt's hostile policies, will apply reciprocal measure.#VisaBan
Ali Abdi, an Iranian with permanent residency of the US, is in limbo in Dubai.
He can not go to Iran because he has been outspoken about human rights violations there, he can not return to the US because of the visa bans and he can not stay longer in Dubai as his visa will run out. He said on his Facebook page:
I am an Iranian PhD student of anthropology in the US. Doing fieldwork is the defining method of our discipline. I left New York on January 22nd, two days after he was sworn in. Now in Dubai, waiting for the issuance of my visa to enter Afghanistan to carry out the ethnographic research. The language of the racist executive order he just signed is ambiguous, but it is likely to prevent permanent residents like me from returning to the country where I am a student, where I have to defend my thesis.
Meanwhile, it’s not yet clear whether the consulate of Afghanistan in Dubai would issue the visa I need in order to stay in Kabul for a year, and I cannot stay in Dubai for long or my UAE visa would expire. It’s not wise to go to Iran either.
Trump has started his round of phonecalls to world leaders with a conversation with Shinzo Abe, prime minister of Japan.
Abe has been invited to a meeting at the White House on 10 February, a White House spokesman told Reuters.
Abe was scheduled to be Trump’s first phone call and is expected to next call German Chancellor Angela Markel before speaking to the Russian President Vladimir Putin.
His call with Putin will be heavily scrutinised following allegations that Russia attempted to interfere in the US election to assist Trump’s victory. Trump has complimented Putin in the past but on Friday said there were no guarantees about relations between the two countries. Trump’s team have hinted at the possibility of a relaxation of US sanctions against Russia.
Later in the afternoon, Trump is scheduled to speak with the French President Francis Hollande and the Australian Prime Minister Malcolm Turnbull.
The calls with France and Germany will come after a joint news conference in Paris with German foreign minster Sigmar Gabriel and French Foreign Minister Jean-Marc Ayrault, where the two men expressed concern over the new immigration restrictions and reaffirmed a hardline stance on Russia sanctions.
Trump’s order banning migrants and refugees from entering the US is illegal, argues an immigration policy expert.
Writing for the New York Times, David J Bier, an analyst at the Cato Institute’s Center for Global Liberty and Prosperity, says that more than 50 years ago, Congress outlawed such discrimination against immigrants based on national origin.
The Immigration and Nationality Act of 1965 banned all discrimination against immigrants on the basis of national origin, Bier writes.
The act was drawn up in response to laws creating a so-called Asiatic Barred Zone, banning immigration from China, Japan and other Asian countries.
Trump points to a 1952 law allowing the president the ability to “suspend the entry” of “any class of aliens”, says Bier, but this ignores restrictions placed by Congress in 1965, stating no person could be “discriminated against in the issuance of an immigrant visa because of the person’s race, sex, nationality, place of birth or place of residence”.
While presidents have used their power dozens of times to keep out certain groups of foreigners under the 1952 law, no president has ever barred an entire nationality of immigrants, says Bier.
While courts rarely interfere in immigration matters, they have affirmed the discrimination ban, he adds.
