BY OSABUOHIEN VIVIAN ROSE
United States President Donald Trump‘s administration is planning a new travel ban that is expected to affect citizens from dozens of countries to varying degrees, The New York Times reported.
Quoting anonymous officials, the report published on Friday said the US government’s draft list featured 43 countries, divided into three categories of travel restrictions.
The first group of 10 countries, including Afghanistan, Iran, Syria, Cuba and North Korea, would be set for a full visa suspension.
In the second group, five countries – Eritrea, Haiti, Laos, Myanmar and South Sudan – would face partial suspensions that would affect tourist and student visas as well as other immigrant visas, with some exceptions.
In the third group, a total of 26 countries that includes Belarus, Pakistan and Turkmenistan would be considered for a partial suspension of US visa issuance if their governments “do not make efforts to address deficiencies within 60 days”, the draft memo said.
A US official speaking on condition of anonymity told the Reuters news agency there could be changes to the list and it was yet to be approved by the administration, including US Secretary of State Marco Rubio.
Trump issued an executive order on January 20 requiring intensified security vetting of any foreigners seeking admission to the US to detect national security threats.
The order directed several cabinet members to submit by March 21 a list of countries from which travel should be partly or fully suspended because their “vetting and screening information is so deficient”.
The US president’s directive is part of an immigration crackdown he launched at the start of his second term. He previewed his plan in an October 2023 speech, pledging to restrict people from the Gaza Strip, Libya, Somalia, Syria, Yemen and “anywhere else that threatens our security”.
The latest travel ban proposal, however, harkens back to Trump’s first-term ban on travellers from seven Muslim-majority nations, a policy that went through several iterations before it was upheld by the Supreme Court in 2018.
That ban targeted citizens of Iran, Iraq, Libya, Somalia, Sudan, Syria and Yemen and ignited international outrage and domestic court rulings against it. Iraq and Sudan were later dropped from the list, but in 2018 the Supreme Court upheld a later version of the ban for the other nations as well as North Korea and Venezuela.
