WASHINGTON—The Trump administration expanded its travel ban to cover five additional countries, and added partial bans on 15 additional countries, in a move to formalize President Trump’s promised crackdown on “third-world countries.”
Citizens of Burkina Faso, Mali, Niger, South Sudan and Syria are joining the list of countries whose citizens are nearly all banned from immigrating to or entering the U.S., according to a White House announcement. Palestinians, whose documents are issued by the Palestinian Authority, are also now banned. Laos and Sierra Leone, which were previously subject to partial bans, will now face full restrictions.
In addition, 15 countries will face new partial bans: Angola, Antigua and Barbuda, Benin, Ivory Coast, Dominica, Gabon, The Gambia, Malawi, Mauritania, Nigeria, Senegal, Tanzania, Tonga, Zambia and Zimbabwe. Citizens from these countries generally won’t be able to apply for tourist or student visas while the ban is in effect.
Trump took the step in an expanding crackdown on legal immigration after an Afghan national was accused of shooting two National Guard members in Washington.
Following the shooting in November, Trump posted on Truth Social that he planned to “permanently pause migration from all Third World Countries to allow the U.S. system to fully recover.” That appeared to form the basis for the latest set of banned countries.
Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem subsequently posted to X that she had met with Trump and recommended a broad ban. “I am recommending a full travel ban on every damn country that’s been flooding our nation with killers, leeches, and entitlement junkies,” she wrote.
The announcement is the latest in Trump’s unprecedented crackdown on legal immigration—much of which had been discussed by immigration officials before the shooting occurred, The Wall Street Journal previously reported. The administration paused all processing of immigration requests by Afghans, including those with pending green card or citizenship applications.
They halted pending asylum decisions for an unspecified length of time. The shooting suspect, 29-year-old Rahmanullah Lakanwal, won his asylum case in April. And they have announced a plan to reopen hundreds of thousands of refugee and asylum applications approved by the Biden administration, meaning they could try and strip some people living here of their permanent legal status.
Refugees are selected and vetted by the U.S. government abroad, while people who win their asylum cases have reached the U.S. on their own but are determined to be in need of the same humanitarian protection as refugees.
Other countries the Trump administration has already subjected to full or partial bans include Afghanistan, Iran and Haiti.
Until recently, only citizens of banned countries who lived abroad were affected. But the administration has developed an additional policy tool to try to bar citizens of banned countries from becoming permanent residents, even if they already live here. Under that policy, people from those countries who apply for a green card would most likely be denied, because their country of origin would be considered a “significantly negative factor” affecting their application.
Write to Michelle Hackman at michelle.hackman@wsj.com