Trump's call to ban Muslims from entering U.S. quietly vanished from his website

Update 2:41 p.m. ET: The statement has reappeared on Trump’s website.

President-elect Donald Trump removed one of the more inflammatory positions of his campaign from his official website on Election Day: the “total and complete shutdown of Muslims entering the United States.”

Online caches show that the last time the statement appeared on Trump’s site was shortly before 9 a.m. on Tuesday. By 11:45 p.m., it was gone, although it’s unclear what time it was removed. Links to the original statement, below, now go to his campaign homepage.

https://www.donaldjtrump.com/press-releases/donald-j.-trump-statement-on-preventing-muslim-immigration

The statement dates back to the Dec. 7, 2015, attacks in San Bernadino, California, where 14 were killed and 22 injured by a married couple with semi-automatic weapons who declared allegiance to the Islamic State group. At that point in Trump’s campaign, the real estate mogul was still vying for his party’s nomination along with 17 other candidates.

“Donald J. Trump is calling for a total and complete shutdown of Muslims entering the United States until our country’s representatives can figure out what is going on,” a statement on Trump’s campaign website read. “According to Pew Research, among others, there is great hatred towards Americans by large segments of the Muslim population.”

“Until we are able to determine and understand this problem and the dangerous threat it poses, our country cannot be the victims of horrendous attacks by people that believe only in Jihad, and have no sense of reason or respect for human life,” the statement continued.

His proposal sparked a swift backlash both home and abroad; his critics accused him of religious discrimination. Support for the ban, however, grew over time. A YouGov poll in March found that 51 percent of Americans supported banning Muslims from entering the United States, six percent more than when Trump first floated the idea.

Trump seemed to walk back the proposed blanket ban on all Muslims entering the United States later in the year. In June, he said he only supported banning “people from terror states” — which Trump’s recently released plan for his first 100 days in office reiterates.

He plans to “suspend immigration from terror-prone regions where vetting cannot safely occur. All vetting of people coming into our country will be considered extreme vetting.”