Border control at Miami International Airport. Photo: JOE RAEDLE / Getty images / Profimedia
The Trump administration announced on Tuesday that it is expanding travel restrictions to the US after, in June, citizens of 12 countries were notified that they would no longer be able to enter US territory, according to The Guardian.
Thus, citizens of Burkina Faso, Mali, Niger, South Sudan and Syria are banned from entering the US. The administration has also completely restricted the travel of people with travel documents issued by the Palestinian Authority.
Another 15 countries face partial restrictions: Angola, Antigua and Barbuda, Benin, Côte d'Ivoire, Dominica, Gabon, Gambia, Malawi, Mauritania, Nigeria, Senegal, Tanzania, Tonga, Zambia and Zimbabwe.
The June ban initially included Afghanistan, Myanmar, Chad, Republic of Congo, Equatorial Guinea, Eritrea, Haiti, Iran, Libya, Somalia, Sudan and Yemen and increased restrictions on visitors from Burundi, Cuba, Laos, Sierra Leone, Togo, Turkmenistan and Venezuela.
The White House said Tuesday that the restrictions are “necessary to prevent the entry of foreign nationals about whom the United States does not have sufficient information to assess the risks they pose. It is the president's duty to take steps to ensure that those who seek to enter our country do not harm the American people.”
The new measure is an intensification of Trump's crackdown in the immediate aftermath of the shooting of two National Guard members in Washington DC on November 26. The suspect is an Afghan national who served in a CIA subordinate unit in Afghanistan and was accepted into the US after the CIA withdrew from that country in 2021. He was then granted asylum.
The Trump administration has highlighted the case to justify tightening immigration controls. Since then, the president himself has engaged in inflammatory racist rhetoric against immigrant groups, The Guardian writes.
The inclusion of Syria on the travel restriction list comes days after three Americans, two soldiers and a civilian, were killed in the country in an attack the US attributed to Islamic State.
Trump recently welcomed the country's president, Ahmed al-Sharaa, to the White House. A White House fact sheet justifying the country's listing stated: “Although the country is working to address its security challenges in close coordination with the United States, Syria still lacks an adequate central authority to issue passports or civil documents and lacks adequate control and verification measures.”
