In response to the outrage surrounding his immigration ban, President Trump has made statements comparing his actions to those of President Obama. Trump and his administration claim that this current ban is similar to the Obama administration's six-month freeze on Iraqi refugee immigration in 2011. However, this comparison is not exactly valid, and it's important that we understand why.

First off, Obama's freeze was a direct response to confirmed dangerous individuals living in the United States, while Trump's ban is in anticipation of potential threats to the nation. The Obama administration put a hold on Iraqi immigration when they discovered two Iraqi immigrants living in Kentucky who had been involved in attacks against U.S. troops in Iraq. The State Department re-screened Iraqi immigrants who were already approved and/or living in the U.S. while simultaneously making the initial screening process more thorough. This freeze, however, did not deal with other countries like Trump's ban does, and was instead a temporary halt on immigration from a single country because of a known threat.

Trump's order bans Syrian refugees indefinitely, other refugees for 120 days, and non-citizens from Iraq, Syria, Iran, Sudan, Libya, Yemen, and Somalia for 90 days (with green card holders being admitted on a case-by-case basis). There is no specific threat from any of these countries, but Trump's intention is to protect America from the possibility of an outside threat. Trump's logic for comparing his order to the situation in 2011 may come from those two Iraqi criminals claiming to be persecuted refugees, and it being the Iraqi refugees that had to be re-screened.

In all fairness, Trump did say "similar" and not "the same," but that's not really how the American people are looking at it, and there's been a lot of uninformed finger-pointing going around. Whether you agree with the ban or not, we need to make sure we're getting all the facts before we start a Facebook argument.