Trump Issues Travel Restrictions for Nationals of 19 Countries

On June 4, Donald Trump issued a presidential proclamation (PP), restricting — in whole or in part — travel to the United States for nationals of 19 countries. Call it “Trump Travel Order 2.0”, building on similar efforts in his first administration that were derided — incorrectly — as a “Muslim Ban”. Plainly, the White House has learned from its past mistakes and challenges.

The 2017 Presidential Proclamation

To plug holes in our national-security vetting systems and protect against foreign threats, then-President Trump issued two executive orders (EOs) and one PP between January and September 2017 that limited the entry of certain foreign nationals to the United States.

Why so many different actions? Because the first two EOs were enjoined by courts based on alleged deficiencies and returned to the executive branch. At each step of that legal journey, the administration refined and bolstered the language and reasoning of those travel limitations.

The last iteration of those restrictions, PP 9645 — “Enhancing Vetting Capabilities and Processes for Detecting Attempted Entry into the United States by Terrorists or Other Public-Safety Threats” — limited entry into the United States by nationals of seven countries: Chad, Iran, Libya, North Korea, Syria, Venezuela, and Yemen.

Those countries were chosen after an exhaustive inter-departmental worldwide review of more than 200 foreign countries’ respective “capacit[ies], ability[ies], and willingness to cooperate with our identity-management and information-sharing policies”, their inclination to accept their returned nationals, and other “risk factors, such as whether it has a significant terrorist presence within its territory”.

Section 212(f)

As with the prior two EOs, states filed suits to block PP 9645, with that last challenge going all the way to a Supreme Court that upheld the validity of those restrictions in its landmark June 2018 opinion in Trump v. Hawaii.

Notably, the Court held that section 212(f) of the Immigration and Nationality Act (INA), the statutory basis for the limitations in PP 9645, “exudes deference to the President in every clause”. That provision states, in pertinent part:

Whenever the President finds that the entry of any aliens or of any class of aliens into the United States would be detrimental to the interests of the United States, he may by proclamation, and for such period as he shall deem necessary, suspend the entry of all aliens or any class of aliens as immigrants or nonimmigrants, or impose on the entry of aliens any restrictions he may deem to be appropriate.

As the justices explained, that provision:

entrusts to the President the decisions whether and when to suspend entry (“whenever he finds that the entry” of aliens “would be detrimental” to the national interest); whose entry to suspend (“all aliens or any class of aliens”); for how long (“for such period as he shall deem necessary”); and on what conditions (“any restrictions he may deem to be appropriate”). It is therefore unsurprising that we have previously observed that [section 212(f) of the INA] vests the President with “ample power” to impose entry restrictions in addition to those elsewhere enumerated in the INA. [Cleaned up.]

The 2020 Proclamation

PP 9645 required DHS to reassess semiannually whether any countries should be added to or removed from the restriction list, and based on its recommendations, the president concluded in PP 9732 that Chad had made sufficient efforts “to cooperate with the United States” on “identity-management and information-sharing criteria”, and dropped it from the list in April 2018.

That review process continued, leading to Trump’s January 2020 issuance of PP 9983, “Improving Enhanced Vetting Capabilities and Processes for Detecting Attempted Entry Into the United States by Terrorists or Other Public-Safety Threats”.

In that PP, new restrictions were placed on six countries: Burma, Eritrea, Kyrgyzstan, Nigeria, Sudan, and Tanzania.

Reversed by Biden

Those travel orders were hotly criticized by his opponents in Trump’s first term, so it wasn’t surprising that on his first day in office, President Biden issued PP 10141, “Ending Discriminatory Bans on Entry to the United States”.

PP 10141 rescinded PP 9645 and PP 9983, which Biden described as “a stain on our national conscience” and “inconsistent with our long history of welcoming people of all faiths and no faith at all”.

Of course, the Biden administration thereafter also quickly reversed nearly every Trump-era policy that had deterred migrants from entering the United States illegally and later implemented so-called “legal pathways” that facilitated the entry and release of migrants without visas and with no right to be admitted.

That triggered the entry of approximately eight million inadmissible “applicants for admission”, the vast majority of whom had no status in the United States and all of whom faced potential removal from the United States.

Aliens from two countries in particular surged into the United States during that Biden migrant crisis: Haitians, who hadn’t previously been subject to restrictions under PP 9645 and PP 9983, and Venezuelans, who had.

According to the DHS Office of Homeland Security Statistics (OHSS), CBP encountered more than 794,000 Venezuelan nationals and nearly 270,000 Haitian nationals between February 2021 and November 2024 at the Southwest border ports, and an additional 117,330 Venezuelans and 211,040 Haitians who came through U.S. airports under Biden’s “CHNV Parole” program as well.

The Latest Proclamation

Those Biden policies proved to be political disasters, and Trump rode a wave of immigration concerns back to the White House last November.

True to his campaign promises, Trump took a number of immigration-related actions on his first day back, one of which was issuing EO 14161, “Protecting the United States from Foreign Terrorists and Other National Security and Public Safety Threats”.

As with the first Trump administration travel EOs, that EO directed the Department of State (DOS), in coordination with the director of National Intelligence, DOJ, and DHS, to identify countries “for which vetting and screening information is so deficient as to warrant a full or partial suspension on the admission of” their nationals to the United States, and to report back to the White House.

The resulting report led to the latest travel PP, which again is largely premised on the expansive and deferential power in section 212(f) of the INA.

Section 2 of that PP “fully suspends” (with limited exceptions) the entry of nationals of 12 countries as immigrants and nonimmigrants: Afghanistan, Burma, Chad, Republic of the Congo, Equatorial Guinea, Eritrea, Haiti, Iran, Libya, Somalia, Sudan, and Yemen.

Section 3 suspends the entry of nationals of seven countries (Burundi, Cuba, Laos, Sierra Leone, Togo, Turkmenistan, and Venezuela), but only as immigrants and under the B (visitors), F (academic student), M (vocational student), and J (exchange visitor) nonimmigrant categories, again with exceptions.

Nonimmigrants under other categories (such as H-1B, “specialty occupations”, and O-1, “extraordinary ability and achievement”, categories) are exempt.

The exceptions under both sections 2 and 3 apply to: green card holders; dual nationals on passports issued by a country not designated; aliens on diplomatic visas; athletes, coaches, and their relatives coming for “the World Cup, Olympics, or other major sporting event”; immediate relatives of U.S. citizens “with clear and convincing evidence of identity and family relationship”; adoptees; Afghan nationals with “Special Immigrant Visas” (SIVs); aliens with SIVs as U.S. government employees; and aliens with “immigrant visas for ethnic and religious minorities facing persecution in Iran”.

There are various reasons why each of those countries was designated, though all landed on the list after being found “deficient with regards to screening and vetting”.

For example, Taliban-led Afghanistan, faction-challenged Libya, long-unruly Somalia, war-torn Sudan, Houthi-contested Yemen, and chavismo-driven “economic basket case” Venezuela were all found to lack a “competent or cooperative central authority for issuing passports or civil documents”.

Needless to say, DHS and DOS can’t screen aliens seeking admission if they can’t trust the alien’s passport and other ID documents.

Similarly, Haiti was found to lack “a central authority with sufficient availability and dissemination of law enforcement information necessary to ensure its nationals do not undermine the national security of the United States”.

Again, unless DHS and DOS can verify that you don’t have a criminal record back home, there is no way for them to determine that you aren’t inadmissible on crime-related grounds or otherwise don’t pose a threat.

In that vein, and logically, Cuba and Iran landed on the naughty list because they’re “state sponsors of terrorism” (Cuba has been designated since 1982 with a brief reprieve under Obama; Iran as such since 1984,) and the latter country “regularly fails to cooperate with the United States Government in identifying security risks” (not a surprise given we’re one of their biggest targets according to the FBI).

Other countries — such as Burundi, Chad, Republic of the Congo, Equatorial Guinea, Togo, and Turkmenistan — were designated because they have a high “visa overstay rate”. In other words, many of their nationals who come here as nonimmigrants never leave, meaning ICE must go and find them.

In addition to having high overstay rates, Burma, Laos, and Sierra Leone are also “recalcitrant” countries in that they have “historically” failed “to accept back their removable nationals” who are deported from the United States.

Recalcitrant country concerns were additional grounds for the designations for Eritrea, Iran, Somalia, Cuba, and Venezuela in the latest PP.

Finally, and in addition to vetting concerns, that PP notes that “hundreds of thousands of illegal Haitian aliens flooded into the United States during the Biden Administration … harm[ing] American communities by creating acute risks of increased overstay rates, establishment of criminal networks, and other national security threats” — further grounds for Haiti’s designation.

Given the measured rationales for each designation and the sweeping authority section 212(f) of the INA grants the president, courts will inevitably affirm Trump Travel Order 2.0 if it is ever challenged. As Oscar Wilde quipped: “Experience is the hardest kind of teacher. It gives you the test first and the lesson afterward.” At least the president learned the lesson from his first go-round.