Trump immigration order causes alarm among Europeans

Mexico isn’t the only close ally and trading partner peeved by President Trump’s flurry of executive actions. Trump also has caused alarm in the European Union with a line in his executive order on immigration instructing agencies to exclude foreigners from privacy protections, threatening to undermine years of intense negotiations over the sharing of commercial data and law enforcement information.

Trump’s aides didn’t consult agency officials who hashed out those agreements before he signed the order, apparently — another example of the White House taking action without the usual vetting that past presidents used to avoid a problem exactly like this one. Now those same officials and lawmakers who were blindsided are scrambling to reassure companies and European allies that the executive order doesn’t have the power to undo the agreements. It's not clear if the White House was aware of the agreements, but it didn’t seem to intend to unsettle them. A White House spokesman emphasized that the executive order says it will be “consistent with applicable law” and referred to the European Commission’s statement that the agreements aren’t affected. The two agreements in question are Privacy Shield, negotiated by the Commerce Department and the European Commission to let companies meet data protection requirements when transferring personal data across the Atlantic, and the U.S.-EU Umbrella Agreement, which covers personal data exchanged for preventing and investigating crime and terrorism.