Trump administration reinstates and expands travel ban
President Donald Trump issued a proclamation on Wednesday restricting the entry of travelers to the United States from more than a dozen countries, resurrecting and expanding sweeping restrictions from his first term that are expected to draw swift legal challenges.
The proclamation, slated to go into effect June 9, fully restricts and limits the entry of individuals from Afghanistan, Myanmar, Chad, the Republic of the Congo, Equatorial Guinea, Eritrea, Haiti, Iran, Libya, Somalia, Sudan and Yemen. It also partially restricts the entry of individuals from Burundi, Cuba, Laos, Sierra Leone, Togo, Turkmenistan and Venezuela.
“We will restore the travel ban, some people call it the Trump travel ban, and keep the radical Islamic terrorists out of our country that was upheld by the Supreme Court,” Trump said in a statement.
The Trump administration, in a document circulated Wednesday evening, said the ban was necessary to compel foreign governments to corporate with their agenda and enforce the country’s immigration laws, among other justifications.
The effort comes as the Trump administration has pursued a series of extraordinary measures to curtail both illegal and legal immigration, including efforts to enact mass deportations, ban birthright citizenship, suspend refugee admissions and scrap due process rights for alleged gang members from Venezuela.
Trump had vowed during his 2024 presidential campaign to reimpose an expanded version of the travel ban, saying it would come back “bigger than before and much stronger than before.” His effort to impose a ban in early 2017 created chaos at U.S. airports and drew legal challenges from civil liberties groups and immigrant rights advocates. The first Trump administration was forced to amend the plans twice before the Supreme Court upheld a third version in June 2018.
The White House previewed the travel ban on Inauguration Day, issuing an executive order that directed the heads of the Departments of State, Justice, and Homeland Security, and the director of U.S. intelligence agencies, to identify “countries throughout the world 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.”
Trump’s executive order in January marked a shift in approach from the early days of Trump’s first term, when the initial version of his travel ban caused widespread confusion and was immediately challenged in court. The first version suspended the refugee program and restricted travel for the citizens of seven Muslim-majority countries: Iran, Iraq, Syria, Somalia, Sudan, Yemen and Libya. Trump issued a second version of the travel ban on March 6, 2017, and a third version on Sept. 24, 2017, amid legal challenges.
The Supreme Court upheld Trump’s travel ban in 2018, after lower courts struck down previous iterations. The third version applied to eight countries, six of which had Muslim majorities. The countries included were Syria, Libya, Iran, Yemen, Somalia, North Korea, Chad and Venezuela. Chad was eventually excluded. A Migration Policy Institute analysis found that the number of visas issued per month for nationals of Iran, Libya, Somalia, Syria, and Yemen declined “an average of 72% between [fiscal year] 2017 and [fiscal year] 2018.”
“By the third ban, the key thing that convinced the Supreme Court was they strengthened their justification for why it was needed,” said Julia Gelatt, associate director of the U.S. Immigration Policy Program at the Migration Policy Institute. “They said basically that the travel ban needed to be in place because the countries that were banned weren’t sharing good information with the United States so it was against U.S. national security.”
President Joe Biden ended Trump’s first travel ban order on his first day in office January 2021, but its effects lingered well into his presidency. Immigrant rights groups said the Biden administration was slow to resume refugee reprocessing due to case backlogs and a lack of resources, in part caused by the COVID-19 pandemic, and migrants faced significant delays.
The Supreme Court’s 2018 decision to uphold the ban could make it more difficult for opponents to block Trump’s new one, some legal analysts said. Still, some immigration lawyers anticipated lawsuits.
“It is true they are on stronger ground than they were before the Supreme Court weighed in on this particular order,” said Raha Wala, vice president of strategy and partnerships at the National Immigration Law Center. “At the same time, a lesson that came out of that is if you’re going to take actions, even if they’re justified by national security, they need to be justified and demonstrated by the administrative record. And it’s not clear to me that the Trump administration has demonstrated any justification for expanding an already expansive travel ban.”
Mark Hetfield, president of HIAS, a refugee resettlement agency, expressed concern about the effect the travel ban will have on potential migrants seeking to flee dangerous countries.
“They’re travel bans from countries that obviously don’t respect human rights and don’t respect the rule of law and have foreign relations issues with the United States,” Hetfield said. “But those are exactly the kinds of countries that produce the refugees and, in particular, produce refugees that the United States would have an interest in resettling.”