U.S. President Donald Trump has indicated that both Afghanistan and Pakistan will be among the countries whose citizens will have to go through an "extreme vetting" process before entering the United States, a Dawn report said.
In an interview to ABC News, Trump was asked why Afghanistan, Pakistan and Saudi Arabia were not on a list of seven Muslim-majority countries whose citizens would be banned from the U.S.
"We're going to have extreme vetting in all cases. And I mean extreme. And we're not letting people in if we think there’s even a little chance of some problem," he replied.
Asked if this was the Muslim ban that he had talked about during the election campaign, he said: "It's not the Muslim ban. But it's countries that have tremendous terror.... And it's countries that people are going to come in and cause us tremendous problems."
He said: "It's going to be very hard to come in. Right now it's very easy to come in. It's gonna be very, very hard."
Reports that the Trump administration would establish a registry for collecting data about Muslims living in the US brought thousands of protesters out in a New York park on Wednesday night and a former secretary of state said she too would register as a Muslim if Muslims were asked to do so, Dawn said.
Madeleine Albright, the first woman US secretary of state, tweeted: "I was raised Catholic, became Episcopalian and found out later my family was Jewish. I stand ready to register as Muslim in solidarity."