The Trump administration has carried out journey restrictions towards residents of a brand new set of nations, extending the journey ban insurance policies which were key components of each Trump phrases. The newest transfer comes because the president has ramped up xenophobic and racist rhetoric in latest weeks.
New journey bans cowl African, Caribbean and Middle Eastern nations and territories
The Trump administration introduced a brand new record of countries going through journey restrictions on Tuesday, including to the record of banned or restricted nations that was introduced earlier this 12 months. The newest record consists of 5 nations for which residents are altogether forbidden from touring to the United States. Four of those nations are in Africa: Burkina Faso, Mali, Niger and South Sudan. Syria additionally faces a complete ban. Additionally, people with journey paperwork issued by the Palestinian Authority are additionally banned.
“Several U.S.-designated terrorist teams function actively within the West Bank or Gaza Strip and have murdered American residents,” in keeping with a White House fact sheet in regards to the Palestinian Authority ban. “Also, the latest conflict in these areas possible resulted in compromised vetting and screening skills.”
The new coverage additionally locations restrictions, however not outright bans, on individuals from 15 different nations: Angola, Antigua and Barbuda, Benin, the Ivory Coast, Dominica, Gabon, Gambia, Malawi, Mauritania, Nigeria, Senegal, Tanzania, Tonga, Zambia and Zimbabwe. Except for Tonga, these nations are all majority-Black and positioned in Africa or the Caribbean. The Trump administration has justified these restrictions by citing safety considerations, claiming that the included nations and territories had “widespread corruption, fraudulent or unreliable civil paperwork and prison data” that interfered with efforts to vet individuals touring from these areas.
Trump’s historical past of journey bans and anti-immigrant insurance policies
The newest iteration of the Trump journey ban provides to a controversial coverage that has been one in every of Trump’s signature coverage initiatives. During his first time period, the coverage was known as a “Muslim ban” by critics as a result of its give attention to predominantly Islamic nations. The administration carried out a number of variations of the travel ban, together with including a number of mostly-African nations in 2020, and the coverage in the end survived authorized challenges that went all the best way to the Supreme Court. Earlier this 12 months, Trump once more issued a journey ban towards a dozen principally Black or Muslim-majority nations.
The Trump journey bans are a part of an aggressively xenophobic method to immigration and worldwide journey. Trump has carried out a sequence of heavy-handed crackdowns on unlawful immigration, scaled again insurance policies like Temporary Protected Status for individuals fleeing harmful conditions in nations akin to Haiti, and ramped up xenophobic and racist rhetoric. Most just lately, after an Afghan man who got here to the United States as an asylum seeker allegedly shot two National Guard members in Washington, D.C., Trump introduced that he was ending immigration to the United States from “Third World” nations. Trump has additionally singled out Somali communities for his racist rhetoric, even reviving his “s**thole nations” slur towards African nations and Haiti.
With the newest additions to Trump’s journey ban, the president has strengthened his anti-immigrant rhetoric with concrete coverage strikes. The new record of nations issued by the White House doubles the variety of nations at present going through journey bans or restrictions from the Trump administration, and the coverage impacts tens of millions of individuals throughout dozens of nations and territories.
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