Credit: The White House / Flickr
The Trump administration is reportedly looking to reinstate a travel ban on an extended list of countries.
According to a report from The New York Times, the administration has drawn up a system of red, orange and yellow countries that will face everything from heavy restrictions to an outright ban.
The report states:
The Trump administration is considering targeting the citizens of as many as 43 countries as part of a new ban on travel to the United States that would be broader than the restrictions imposed during President Trump’s first term, according to officials familiar with the matter.
A draft list of recommendations developed by diplomatic and security officials suggests a “red” list of 11 countries whose citizens would be flatly barred from entering the United States. They are Afghanistan, Bhutan, Cuba, Iran, Libya, North Korea, Somalia, Sudan, Syria, Venezuela and Yemen, the officials said.
The officials, who spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss the sensitive internal deliberations, cautioned that the list had been developed by the State Department several weeks ago, and that changes were likely by the time it reached the White House.
Officials at embassies and in regional bureaus at the State Department, and security specialists at other departments and intelligence agencies, have been reviewing the draft. They are providing comment about whether descriptions of deficiencies in particular countries are accurate or whether there are policy reasons — like not risking disruption to cooperation on some other priority — to reconsider including some.
Featuring on the “orange list” of countries are Belarus, Eritrea, Haiti, Laos, Myanmar, Pakistan, Russia, Sierra Leone, South Sudan and Turkmenistan.
Under the current plans, those countries would have their visas “sharply restricted,” although exceptions may be carved out for wealthy business travelers.
Countries on the yellow list include Angola, Antigua and Barbuda, Benin, Burkina Faso, Cambodia, Cameroon, Cape Verde, Republic of Congo, Chad, Dominica, Equatorial Guinea, Gambia, Liberia, Malawi, Mali, Mauritiana, St. Kitts and Nevis, St Lucia, Vanuatu and Zimbabwe.
These countries would be given 60 days to solve their “perceived deficiencies,” which include failing to share adequate levels of information, unreliable issuing of passports and the presence of schemes that sell a route to U.S. citizenship.
The plans are part of an executive order signed by Trump in January that seeks to protect Americanss “from aliens who intend to commit terrorist attacks, threaten our national security, espouse hateful ideology or otherwise exploit the immigration laws for malevolent purposes.”
Under the terms of the order, the State Department is required to identify countries “for which vetting and screening information is so deficient as to warrant a partial or full suspension on the admission of nationals from those countries.”
During his first presidency, Trump imposed a similar travel that was falsely dubbed by the media as the “Muslim Ban,” despite the fact it targeted people from non-Muslim countries including North Korea and Venezuela.
This ban was later revoked by Joe Biden on his first day in office.
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