US security chiefs have admitted flaws in the way President Donald Trump’s bar on people from seven countries entering the US was implemented.
The policy has caused uproar internationally and was challenged by the acting US attorney general, who Mr Trump then fired.
Top Republican Paul Ryan said he regretted that some people with valid documents were affected.
But he also defended the ban, saying it aimed to prevent terror attacks.
Speaking at a news conference, the heads of the department of Homeland Security and Customs and Border Protection (CBP) said 720 people had been detained and “humanely processed” since Mr Trump’s executive order had been issued.
CBP chief Kevin McAleenan acknowledged that communications “publicly and inter-agency haven’t been the best” as the policy was rolled out.
He also said that although the order had suspended the US refugee programme, 872 refugees had been granted waivers and were due to arrive in the US this week because they had been ready to travel and preventing them from doing so would have caused undue hardship.
Homeland Security chief John Kelly denied that President Trump’s order – which affects people from Iran, Iraq, Libya, Somalia, Sudan, Syria and Yemen – amounted to a ban on Muslims and said the vast majority of the world’s Muslims still had access to the US.
He said the 90-day order would give officials time to analyse the strengths and weaknesses of the US immigration system, something he said was “long overdue”.
“Some of those countries may not be taken off the list any time soon. They are countries that are in various states of collapse,” he said.
The US was also considering examining the web browsing history, mobile phone contacts and social media profiles of visa applicants from countries where there was little confidence in local law enforcement agencies, he said. Mr McAleenan offered some clarification on how dual citizens were affected, saying the US authorities would handle people based on the passport they were travelling on.
Several governments – including the UK, Canada and Switzerland – have already said that their citizens who are also citizens of the seven countries affected by the ban are free to travel to the US.
Mr Ryan said he was confident that the policy would now be “done correctly” and would impose the “kind of vetting standards that we all want to see”. “No-one wanted to see people with Green Cards or special immigrant visas, like translators, get caught up in all of this,” he said.
However, new UN Secretary General Antonio Guterres said closing borders to people based on their religion, ethnicity or nationality was a “blind” measure.
It risked handing a propaganda victory to extremists and was easily bypassed by today’s sophisticated terrorist organisations, he said.
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