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The Trump administration has expanded its ban on entry into the US to people holding passports issued by the Palestinian Authority, Syria and six other countries, citing national security and public safety concerns.
The proclamation issued on Tuesday by President Donald Trump also adds Burkina Faso, Mali, Niger, South Sudan, Laos and Sierra Leone to a list of 12 countries whose nationals are subject to an entry ban enacted earlier this year. It also expands to 19 a list of nations that are subject to partial entry restrictions.
The document states that the policy was necessary to “advance” immigration, foreign policy, national security and counterterrorism objectives; to keep out insufficiently vetted travellers; and to “garner co-operation from foreign governments”.
It cites war, weak governance and visa overstay rates as justification for the countries listed, but does not cite evidence of specific security threats posed by their nationals.
US permanent residents and current visa holders are exempt.
The proclamation comes after an Afghan man, whom officials say was evacuated to the US during the country’s 2021 withdrawal from Afghanistan, shot two members of the US National Guard, killing one. US officials said the November attack was motivated by extremist ideology.
Trump swiftly halted visa processing for all Afghan nationals.
He also earlier this year ended policies that had protected Syrians and South Sudanese from deportation.
Trump has made a crackdown on immigration — both legal and illegal — a hallmark of his second term, deploying US immigration agents to carry out raids and arrests of foreigners without valid visas across the country. His domestic critics have accused the administration of seeking to block or remove predominantly non-white foreigners from the US.
In previous moves this year, Trump banned entry to the US to the nationals of Chad, the Republic of the Congo, Equatorial Guinea, Eritrea, Haiti, Iran, Libya, Somalia, Sudan, Yemen and Myanmar — which the administration referred to as Burma — and halted US refugee admissions for all but some 650 people — the vast majority of them white South Africans.
The policies represent a continuation of those advanced by Trump during his first term in the White House. His earlier crackdown provoked an outcry from human rights monitors at home and abroad over the administration’s forced separation of children from their parents at the US-Mexican border, and for the so-called Muslim ban that sought to block entry to the nationals of a number of Muslim-majority countries.