By: Teddy Grant 

Former President Donald Trump’s Muslim travel ban negatively impacted the health of Muslim Americans in Minnesota, according to a study in the Journal of the American Medical Association by the Yale School of Public Health.   

Researchers looked at over 250,000 adult patients in the Minneapolis-St. Paul metropolitan area between January 2016 and December 2017. There was an increase in emergency room visits during this time, a decrease in primary care appointments and more stress-related illnesses among Muslim, refugee and immigrant communities, HuffPost reported.   

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“This offers support to the thesis that the Islamophobia fostered by former President Trump affected the health of Muslim-Americans in the United States and that immigration policies can have indirect and unexpected consequences for those targeted by such actions,” said Yale School of Public Health Associate Professor Gregg Gonsalves.  

Trump had issued the travel ban within a week of taking office, limiting the travels of people from Iran, Iraq, Libya, Syria, Sudan and Yemen.  

The Supreme Court upheld the ban in 2018. President Joe Biden reversed the ban once he took office in January.   

“The psychological and social pressures of what happened during the Trump administration are not just bureaucratic, legal effects,” said Gonsalves, the study’s senior author. “They are effects on people’s bodies and people’s psyches and people’s minds and people’s sense of well-being.”