On Friday, January 27th, President Donald Trump made an executive order to ban the admission of Syrian refugees for 120 days and the admission of the green card holding citizens who are from Iran, Iraq, Libya, Somalia, Sudan, Syria, and Yemen for 90 days. As this order became clear, many of those affected Muslims were either on their way back to the states or en route and were kept in airports for hours, some still stuck in deportation rooms in airports nationwide.

The United Nations reported that as of the executive order on Friday, about 20,000 refugees have been frozen from entry into the country. What really makes this order worst is that it was signed on Holocaust Remembrance Day, remembering victims of one of the biggest human genocides in modern history.

As news of this has spread throughout news outlets and social media this weekend, Former President Obama issued a statement via his spokesmen Kevin Lewis. In the statement posted Monday morning, he praised those standing in solidarity and protesting against Trump’s Muslim Ban, as well as disagreeing completely with the executive order. This has been his first time speaking since the end of his presidency, now as a private citizen. With many mentioning that the executive order was inspired by his policies in his administration, Lewis mentions at the end that the former POTUS has never agreed on a ban of Muslims.