A travel ban could affect at least 40 countries, according to a report by the New York Times.
President Donald Trump’s administration is pondering a new travel ban that is expected to affect citizens of dozens of countries to varying degrees, the New York Times reported.
Citing an anonymous official, the report, released Friday, said that the US government’s draft list featured 43 countries split into three categories of travel restrictions.
The first group of ten countries, including Afghanistan, Iran, Syria, Cuba and North Korea, will be set up for full visa suspension.
In the second group, five countries, Eritrea, Haiti, Laos, Myanmar and South Sudan, will face partial suspensions affecting tourists, student visas and other immigrant visas, with a few exceptions.
In the third group, a total of 26 countries, including Belarus, Pakistan and Turkmenistan, will be considered for a partial suspension of US visa issuance if the government “does not make an effort to address the defect within 60 days,” the draft memo said.
A US official speaking on condition of anonymity said the list could change for Reuters and that it has not yet been approved by the administration, including US Secretary of State Marco Rubio.
On January 20, Trump called for an intensified security review of foreigners seeking entry into the United States to detect national security threats.
The order directed several Cabinet members by March 21 to submit a list of countries where travel must be partially or completely suspended due to the very insufficient review and screening information.
The US President’s order is part of the immigrant crackdown that he began at the start of his second term. He previewed the plan in his October 2023 speech, pledging to limit the Gaza Strip, Libya, Somalia, Syria, Yemen and people “in the rest of our security.”
However, the latest travel ban proposal returns to Trump’s first-term ban on travelers from the vast majority of seven Muslim countries, a policy that went through several iterations before being upheld by the Supreme Court in 2018.
The ban targeted citizens of Iran, Iraq, Libya, Somalia, Sudan, Syria and Yemen, sparking international outrage and domestic court rulings over it. Iraq and Sudan were later dropped from the list, but in 2018 the Supreme Court upheld a later version of the ban on other countries, North Korea and Venezuela.
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