President Donald Trump's immigration and travel ban reportedly could derail a pair of pending deals with General Electric, the Iraqi government reportedly has warned the industrial conglomerate.
GE, which produces nuclear reactors and aircraft engines, has sizable interests in Iraq, including power contracts worth more than a billion dollars and hundreds of employees in the country. according to internal State Department documents, Politico reported.
But U.S. diplomats, citing a senior Iraqi government official, are reporting that the Baghdad government "was preparing to sign two more deals with U.S. company General Electric that could be negatively affected, and that the prime minster wanted to expand Iraq's cooperation with GE into the health, transportation, and aviation sectors, as well as sign a maintenance contract with GE worth billions of dollars," according to a memo obtained by Politico.
"The travel ban called into question whether GE and the U.S. could be reliable partners," Politico cited the memo. "Such cooperation would be hurt by the new visa policy," Politico cited the memo as saying.
“It is unclear whether the Iraqi warnings to American diplomats this week are suggesting the deals would be canceled as retaliation, or whether the 90-day ban might impact personnel involved in the negotiations or the actual work,” Politico explained.
The State Department memo also does not identify the specific contracts in question and a GE spokeswoman declined to comment, Politico reported.
Trump's order, dubbed "Protecting the nation from foreign terrorist entry into the United States," bans citizens from Syria, Somalia, Iran, Libya, Sudan, Yemen and Iraq from entering the country for at least 90 days. It also suspends the refugee program for four months, bans Syrian refugees, calls for new immigration screening procedures and directs the secretary of Homeland Security to conduct a 30-day review to determine which countries fail to provide "adequate information" for its citizens to be issued visas to enter the United States.
Meanwhile, a watchdog agency at the U.S. Department of Homeland Security said it is planning to review how Trump's immigration executive order to temporarily suspend travel from seven majority-Muslim nations was implemented, Reuters reported.
The review of Friday's order was being planned "in response to congressional request and whistleblower and hotline complaints," the DHS's Office of Inspector General said in a statement late Wednesday.
The watchdog agency would also look at "DHS' adherence to court orders and allegations of individual misconduct on the part of DHS personnel," the statement said. "If circumstances warrant, the OIG will consider including other issues that may arise during the course of the review."
The order triggered widespread protests and caused confusion for travelers around the world.
It also spurred several legal challenges, in particular over the initial detention or barring from flights of legal permanent residents who hold U.S. green cards.
(Newsmax wire services, Bloomberg and Reuters contributed to this report).
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