Former President Trump said Friday for the first time publicly during the 2024 presidential campaign that he would bring back a travel ban "even bigger than before," alluding to his administration's restrictions on travelers from heavily Muslim countries.
The first two bans faced steep challenges in court, but the third version of the ban was upheld by the Supreme Court in a 5-4 decision in 2018. That ban barred nearly all travelers from five mainly Muslim countries, in addition to North Korea and Venezuela. President Biden signed an executive order reversing the ban his first week in office.
Trump made the comment in Council Bluffs, Iowa, as he made his pitch to voters in the largely White state.
"Under the Trump administration, we imposed extreme vetting and put on a powerful travel ban to keep radical Islamic terrorists and jihadists out of our country," Trump told his audience. "Well, how did that work out? We had no problem, right? They knew they couldn't come here if they had that moniker. They couldn't come here."
"When I return to office, the travel ban is coming back even bigger than before and much stronger than before. We don't want people blowing up our shopping centers. We don't want people blowing up our cities and we don't want people stealing our farms. So it's not gonna happen."
Trump didn't say how he would expand a travel ban beyond the version he implemented during his administration.
The Daily Beast reported in May that Trump had for months been telling those close to him that he plans to bring back the ban if reelected in 2024.
Kathryn Watson is a politics reporter for CBS News Digital based in Washington, D.C.