Afghanistan and Myanmar Added to Trump’s Travel Ban List
The two nations are among 12 that the U.S. president accuses of having “taken advantage” of the U.S. visa system.
Two Asia-Pacific nations are among the 12 nations that were hit with entry bans by U.S. President Donald Trump due to their “deficient” vetting and screening processes.
According to a proclamation signed by Trump yesterday, citizens from Afghanistan and Myanmar will be barred from entering the United States, along with nationals from Chad, the Republic of the Congo, Equatorial Guinea, Eritrea, Haiti, Iran, Libya, Somalia, Sudan, and Yemen. The ban, which marks a revival of one of the most controversial policies from Trump’s first term, will enter into effect on June 9.
The proclamation states that the 12 nations were among those identified by the U.S. government as remaining “deficient with regards to screening and vetting” and which have “taken advantage of the United States in their exploitation of our visa system and their historic failure to accept back their removable nationals.”
In a recorded video address, Trump referenced the recent antisemitic firebombing in Boulder, Colorado, as an example of the dangers of allowing foreign nations to overstay their visas, the Associated Press reported. The suspect in the attack, which injured 15 people, is Mohamed Sabry Soliman, an Egyptian man whom the Department of Homeland Security claims overstayed a tourist visa. Soliman’s family has been taken into federal custody and could be deported soon, U.S. officials say.
“We don’t want them,” Trump said in the video. “In the 21st century, we’ve seen one terror attack after another carried out by visa overstayers from dangerous places all over the world.”
The proclamation relies on the Department of Homeland Security’s annual Entry/Exit Overstay Report, which details rates of visa overstays for tourists, business visitors, and students from foreign countries. The selection appears to be based on those nations with the highest rates of overstays, rather than on an assessment of the risk to U.S. security posed by citizens of those nations. In addition to the 12 nations hit with full entry bans, Trump has also imposed a partial ban on citizens from Burundi, Cuba, Laos, Sierra Leone, Togo, Turkmenistan, and Venezuela.
“I must act to protect the national security and national interest of the United States and its people,” Trump said in the proclamation.
In justification for the ban on Afghans entering the U.S., Trump’s proclamation claims that the country’s Taliban government, which Washington has designated as a terrorist organization, “lacks a competent or cooperative central authority for issuing passports or civil documents and it does not have appropriate screening and vetting measures.” It cited Department of Homeland Security statistics showing that Afghanistan had an overstay rate of 9.70 percent on business and tourist visas, and a rate of 29.30 percent on student, vocational, and exchange visitor visas.
On Myanmar, it said that the country had a tourist and business visa overstay rate of 27.07 percent, and an overstay rate of 42.17 percent for student, vocational, and exchange visitor visas. The nation has also “historically not cooperated with the United States to accept back their removable nationals.”
Afghanistan and Myanmar have recently also been significant sources of immigration and refugee arrivals to the United States. The U.S. hosts nearly 200,000 Afghans, including both immigrants and tens of thousands evacuated after the collapse of the Afghan government to the Taliban in 2021. Meanwhile, 117,557 refugees from Myanmar were admitted to the U.S. between 2011 and 2023, according to the Refugee Processing Center, making it the top nation of origin during that period. More than 188,095 Myanmar refugees have been admitted to the U.S. since 2000, according to the Burmese American Community Institute.
The latter figures are a reflection of the prolonged, and worsening refugee crisis that Myanmar has experienced over the past decade, spanning the military’s 2017 ethnic cleansing campaign against the Rohingya, around 1 million of whom are currently stranded in giant refugee camps in Bangladesh, and the current civil war, which has displaced more than 3.5 million people and led tens of thousands more to flee the country since 2021.
However, the Trump administration has already taken actions to close off the United States as a potential third-country destination for refugees. In January, in one of his first acts as president, Trump signed an executive order stopping indefinitely all refugee admissions to the country. The order stated that the secretaries of state and homeland security “may jointly determine to admit aliens to the United States as refugees on a case-by-case basis, in their discretion, but only so long as they determine that the entry of such aliens as refugees is in the national interest and does not pose a threat to the security or welfare of the United States.”
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